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GOLD, FRANKINCENSE 
AND MYRRH 



RALPH ADAMS CRAM 




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GOLD, FRANKINCENSE 
AND MYRRH 



GOLD 

FRANKINCENSE 

AND MYRRH 



RALPH ADAMS CRAM 

t 

LITT.D., LL.D. 




BOSTON 

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 

M D CCCC XIX 



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Copyright, igig 
By Marshall Jones Company 



All rights reser'ved 
First printing, November, 191 9 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



(g)CI.A5o9178 
DEC 1 1 1919 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface vii 

MONASTICISM AND THE WoRLD CrISIS I 

Sacramentalism and the Future . 34 
The Philosophical Necessity . . 67 



PREFACE 

OF the three addresses that make up 
I this volume, the first was delivered 
in 19 1 7 before the students of the 
General Theological Seminary in New 
York, the second at the fiftieth anniversary 
of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacra- 
ment, at the Church of St Mary the Virgin 
in New York, in 191 8, while the third was 
read at a meeting of the Clerical Brother- 
hood of the Episcopal Church in the Dio- 
cese of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, in 
19 19. All three have been published in 
The American Church Monthly^ and per- 
mission to reprint has been given by the 
editor, the Reverend Selden Peabody De- 
lany, D.D. The third of the addresses, 
^^The Philosophical Necessity," has also 
been republished by the Reverend Thomas 
Edward Shields, D.D., in The Catholic 
Educational Review. 

For the doctrines, statements and infer- 
ences that are to be found in the three 
addresses, no responsibility can in any de- 
[vli] 



PREFACE 

gree be attached to the governing body of 
the General Theological Seminary or to 
the officers of the Confraternity of the 
Blessed Sacrament or to the Bishop of 
Pennsylvania. The various papers vsrere 
read without having been first given a 
nihil obstat by any one in authority, and 
I desire to take entirely on my own shoul- 
ders the responsibility for what I have 
said. As the third essay is in a sense an 
extension and amplification of the second, 
and as it was given before a different audi- 
ence, certain repetitions occur, but it has 
seemed best to leave the papers in their 
original estate, except that from the second 
has been omitted the philosophical argu- 
ment for the doctrine of Transubstantiation 
(this also was left out in The American 
Church Monthly) which was later ampli- 
fied into the Philadelphia address. 

The title ^^ Gold, Frankincense and 
Myrrh" means simply this: Gold is the 
pure, imperishable quality of the monastic 
ideal. Frankincense the supreme act of 
worship through the Blessed Sacrament, 
Myrrh the saving quality of a right philoso- 
phy of life that yet must be bitter to the 
taste of many people. Together they are 

[ viii ] 



PREFACE 

the three gifts that must again be offered 
by a world once more led, though now by 
the red and malefic star of war, to worship 
and fall down before the Incarnate God 
so long and so lightly denied. 

RALPH ADAMS CRAM. 
23rd June, 1919. 



[ ix] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE 
AND MYRRH 



MONASTICISM AND THE 
WORLD CRISIS 

E^ all the manifestations of natural 
forces, like the pulsing of the life- 
blood, like life itself, history is a 
system of vast vibrations, systole and diastole 
beating eternally, but with nodes that are 
separated not by fractional seconds, but by 
intervals of five centuries. From the day 
of the Incarnation, back through Europe, 
Asia, Africa, until chronology merges in 
myth and tradition, and on, even to this 
day, and so forward until the end, this 
enormous vibration controls and conditions 
man, and he plays his part on the rise, the 
crest, or the descent of the wave, helpless 
to change its course or to avert its fall. 

The fable of evolution, the delusion of 
continuous progress, the dream of the final 
perfectibility of man on earth, break down 
and die under the hard light of universal 
catastrophe, vanishing with all the other 
illusions of modernism that have made that 
catastrophe not a ghastly accident but an 

[ I 1 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

expiation and a potential redemption, while 
blinding the world to its implacable ap- 
proach. For the individual there may be 
progress, but the rise from birth to maturity 
is followed by declension to the grave. For 
the community or the state there may be 
progress, but the upward sweep of the elan 
vital curves at last, in its brief trajectory, to 
merge again in the inert mass through 
which it sprang, and the jungles of Asia, 
the sands of African deserts, the forests of 
Europe hide the forgotten shards of uni- 
versal civilizations whose names are words 
only, and whose deeds are of the dust that 
buries their monuments. For mankind it- 
self there may be progress, out of periodical 
misery and oblivion, upward to honour and 
dignity and worth and power, but always 
the parabola traces its dying fall, and this 
spurt of progress lasts not five centuries, 
beyond which term nothing may pass with- 
out failure, extinction and supersession. 

History is a series of resurrections, for 
the rhythm of change is invariable. Each 
epoch of five hundred years follows the 
same monotonous course, though made dis- 
tinctive by new variations. Since the Chris- 
tian era Imperial Rome has risen, culmi- 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

nated and disappeared ^^ under the drums 
and tramplings of four conquests." The 
Eastern Empire has succeeded, with the 
first congeries of Christian states in the 
West. Mediaevalism has burst like a new 
day on Europe, to go to its end five cen- 
turies later as our own epoch began its 
astounding career. The birth of Christ, 
the years 500, 1000, 1500, are nodal points 
when all that had been ceased and new 
things came into being: before the year 
2000, now but two generations away, mod- 
ern civilization will have passed and a 
new era have taken its place. Already 
the whirlwind of destruction has overtaken 
it, and for more than three years, it has 
suffered the first of the assaults that will 
in the end make it one with Babylon and 
with Nineveh. 

We are today in the midst of just such a 
grinding collapse as that which overtook 
Rome and the empire of Charlemagne 
and the Christian Commonwealths of the 
Middle Ages, and we shall escape no more 
than they. Neither scientific accomplish- 
ment nor efficiency, neither parliamentary 
government nor industrialism, neither 
wealth nor self-confidence, neither pacifism 

[3] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

nor neutrality can save us, for we have 
reached the crest of folly that crowns 
achievement, and beyond lies the shudder- 
ing fall into the trough of the heaving 
sea. But the wave, if it falls, rises again, 
and history, if it shouts its warning, whis- 
pers also its hope. If night follows day, 
day follows night, and since Christ came 
we have not only the hope but the way. 
And the way has never changed in essence, 
though it has varied widely in its manifesta- 
tions. As Rome fell, St. Benedict of Nursia 
rose above the welter of ruin to save what 
might be saved and to build society anew. 
As the first Holy Roman Empire broke 
down in ruin, St. Odo of Cluny in his turn 
saved something from the wreck, began 
the new era of Christian civilization ia 
the North, and gave it to St. Robert of 
Molesmes, who transformed it by Cister- 
cianism into a thing of unexampled nobil- 
ity and fixed forever the standard type of 
Christian society. When at last this also 
began to decline, its time having arrived, a 
sudden new life swept through the mori- 
bund orders, — Benedictine, Cistercian, Do- 
minican, — ^ making them once more con- 
structive and regenerative agencies, while 

[4] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

by means of an entirely novel version of the 
monastic method, St. Ignatius Loyola 
stopped the progress of devouring heresy 
and concentrated in centres of tremendous 
dynamic force the shattered and dislocated 
elements of Catholic Christianity, that they 
might engender the counter-reformation 
and preserve fundamental Christianity until 
better days. 

So in the first years of the sixth cen- 
tury, the last years of the tenth, and the 
first years of the sixteenth, at intervals 
of approximately five hundred years, just 
at the nodal point where one era was 
dying in dishonour, and another rising in 
power, came a new outpouring of monastic 
fervour to save and to recreate. In the year 
927 St. Odo promulgated the reformed rule 
of the Order of Cluny, and the Dark Ages 
came to an end within sixty years, to give 
place to Christian civilization. One thou- 
sand years from then will bring us to the 
year 1927, but we need not wait until then 
for the assurance that God has again been 
merciful and given the world a new hope, 
for nearly fifty years ago came the first 
evidences of the new life, and now the 
death of civilization seals the early assur- 

[5] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

ance, and everywhere may be seen the 
stirrings of the Holy Spirit leading men 
once more into this earthly army of God. 

For it is the consecrated Religious Life 
that has been the divine agency for the sav- 
ing of the world at all its moments of most 
critical peril; and if you will study the 
phenomena of periodic degeneration, and 
the spirit and method of monasticism, you 
will see that this must inevitably be so. As 
each era of the world reaches its fulfilment, 
it suddenly festers into five cancerous sores: 
wealth and luxury, lust and licentiousness, 
wilfulness and individualism, leading in 
the end to anarchy, envy and egotism, and 
finally the idleness of the parasite. You 
will find most of these, in varying measure, 
in the last years of Rome, of the Carolin- 
gian Empire and the Eastern Empire, of 
the epoch of Mediaevalism; and you will 
find them all, and without measure, in the 
last years of the nineteenth and the elapsed 
years of the twentieth century. 

Now against them the Religious Life 
has set the three great evangelical councils 
of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience, add- 
ing to them two other principles of equal 
value, viz.. Brotherhood and Work. Each 

[6] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

is the explicit negation and corrective of 
some one of the sins of success, and together 
they form the energizing force that brings 
a new era into being. 

There is no other way. As an era dies, 
it engenders an all-embracing mortality in 
its members, and there is nothing essentially 
of itself, either in its works or its men, that 
retains regenerative power. When an age 
dies, it dies altogether, though such spirit- 
ual force as it may have generated continues 
beyond its own decadence and fall as a 
slowly dissipating impulse in art. In the 
end this is dispersed and art ceases for the 
time, but it never had a truly vital quality 
in the establishing and determining of 
spiritual values, finding its function only in 
an empty aestheticism that ended at last in 
the various historical predecessors of art 
nouveau and vers libre. As in all life, the 
dynamic impulse towards new things comes 
from without, a sudden jet of the elan vital, 
expressing itself through a swift intensifica- 
tion — exaggeration if you like — of those 
fundamental principles of all wholesome 
society that have been lost out of life and 
must in some way be restored. 

It is not necessary to maintain that the 
[7] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

monastic life is an universal ideal : the claim 
is not even made. It is rather a highly 
special form of life, normally fitted for 
comparatively few men and women; but at 
abnormal times, such as the closing years of 
an epoch, it becomes not a refuge but a duty 
and a call to sacrifice. The army is not 
the normal life for all, but at critical mo- 
ments, when honour and justice and eternal 
truths are imperilled, it sends its clear call 
to all men for holy service in warfare. 
Nothing can take its place; none of the 
agencies of peace and order may serve; 
and if men do not arise, and at any cost, 
even of life itself, range themselves in the 
front of battle, nothing follows but hu- 
miliation, disaster, and the death of more 
than men and women and children. 

The Religious Life is a life of continual 
sacrifice, but nothing of enduring value in 
the world has been attained except through 
sacrifice. Wealth and ease, peace and 
plenty, material success and serene content, 
never won anything, either for the indi- 
vidual, the community or the state, while 
they lead inevitably to decadence and 
downfall. Adversity and suffering, sorrow 
and labour and sacrifice, are the builders 

[ 8] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

of character, the foundation-stones of right- 
eous civilization. Out of these sacrifices 
that monasticism demands, has come for 
myriads of men and women more than 
adequate personal compensation, as this 
comes to the soldier in the trenches of 
France, dying a clean death in a holy cause. 
This, however, is only a by-product; the 
great thing is the unique and splendid op- 
portunity for service, for the doing of what 
no one else can do, and this the noblest 
service that man can render to man. For 
more than tv^o years millions of men and 
boys have sacrificed all that life could give 
to save something from the wreck of a 
world, and their sacrifice will not be in vain 
so far as the first victory at arms is con- 
cerned. It will, in the end, have been in 
vain if there are not now the few thousands 
of their brothers to make their smaller 
sacrifice in order that the victory they have 
bought with their blood may be sealed by 
that spiritual regeneration which always 
has been, and always will be, the work of 
those whom God has called to the Religious 
Life. 

As we look back through history we can 
see how terrible was the fall, how gross the 

[9] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

enveloping darknesss of the end of An- 
tiquity, of the close of the Dark Ages, of 
the break-up of Mediaevalism. We cannot 
imagine what fearful fate must have over- 
taken the world if it had not been for the 
followers of the consecrated Religious Life, 
from St. Benedict to St. Ignatius Loyola. 
Today the fall and the darkness are more 
profound than ever before, except possibly 
at the end of the Roman Empire; there- 
fore the old call is more insistent as the need 
is correspondingly greater. Everything 
with which and by which our modern era 
has lived, shatters before us, and no visible 
foundation remains. Protestantism and 
free thought, parliamentary government 
and democracy, natural science, industrial 
civilization and material efficiency, evo- 
lutionary philosophy, pragmatism, deter- 
minism, freedom of speech and freedom of 
the press and compulsory public education 
— all these, and their myriad concomitants, 
crumble, totter, and melt away before the 
Frankenstein monster they themselves had 
created. 

I do not mean that all these proud prod- 
ucts of modernism now show themselves as 
entirely empty delusions, for the greater 

[ lo] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

part of them express some element of truth 
or usefulness. In every case, however, they 
have either been exaggerated out of all 
reason, falsified by removal from contact 
with some other opposed principle which 
alone could have acted as a corrective, or 
finally their original idea has been lost sight 
of under some mechanistic incubus we have 
invented as a means to an end, and then have 
accepted as the end in itself, to the utter 
forgetfulness of the object of our labour, 
which has consequently disappeared. An 
example of what I mean is democracy, 
which is a splendid ideal in itself, and 
worth fighting for; but for a century we 
have been so ridiculously busy in inventing 
new engines for creating it, in discovering 
new panaceas for correcting our intermin- 
able failures, that at last we have not the 
remotest idea in what democracy consists, 
and actually, in the midst of an insane 
phantasmagoria of political devices, have 
seen not only the humiliating failure of 
these patented nostrums but the almost 
complete disappearance of the democratic 
idea as a moving cause or even as a dim and 
mythical tradition. 

So it is with the other things I have 
[ II ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

named, and as they break down visibly 
before us, we realize that the very founda- 
tions of life are overturned, that our light 
has become darkness, and we have no guide 
for our steps. We have made our world 
over to suit ourselves, and at the very mo- 
ment when we look on it and see that it 
is good, it crumbles into mere debris ; hol- 
low, unsubstantial, insecure, it cannot en- 
dure the touch of real life, and breaks in 
pieces of its own unwieldiness. 

In all this there is no ground for final 
discouragement. All depends on how we 
meet the crisis, how we bear the test, with 
what standards we measure the new, hard, 
and even appalling things that are put be- 
fore us. At last Calvinism is no longer 
upon us, to weigh us down under a base 
fatalism. We know our choice is free, and 
we may will a new Dark Ages or a new Ren- 
aissance — better still a new Mediaevalism. 
AH depends on how we, ourselves, meet the 
issue. 

For this vast cataclysm is not a trying 
out of individuals, or of a few nations, but 
of all men, east, west, north and south. 
None may escape, for, each in its own de- 
gree, every race on earth lies under the 

[ 12] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

same condemnation, from Russia, which 
had surrendered least, to Prussia, which 
had surrendered all. A system nearly five 
centuries old is being tried that it may be 
destroyed, and destroyed that something 
better may take its place. 

As five centuries ago, and ten and fifteen 
and twenty, the saving motive will be the 
Catholic Faith, poured out anew upon the 
nations; and as five centuries ago, and ten 
and fifteen, the visible and divinely directed 
means will be the consecrated Religious 
Life. Not through archaic and pictorial 
revivals, but under the drive of a new spirit- 
ual consciousness implanted in man by God 
the Holy Ghost, working itself out under 
old rules and under reformed rules, but 
in essence what it always has been and al- 
ways will be. Monasticism— I use the term 
generally as including all types of monks, 
friars, canons-regular, and missionaries 
bound under the vows of poverty, chastity, 
and obedience — is divine in its essence and 
its order, therefore an essential and inde- 
structible portion of the visible Catholic 
Church, but it is manifested through hu- 
man agencies, therefore fallible and des- 
tined to decay and to demand reform; 

[ 13 1 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

destined equally to adapt itself to new 
times and to new conditions. Within these 
great and closing walls of poverty, chas- 
tity and obedience, brotherhood and work, 
it will transmute itself into new forms, but 
always there will be three great classes, 
the general motive of which will never 
change, and the demand for which, and 
for all, was never more insistent than 
today; and these three are the monk, the 
friar and the canon-regular. Let me try 
to show why each is needed today, whether 
he lives under the old rules of St. Bene- 
dict, St. Francis or St. Augustine, or under 
some modification thereof. 

The ideal of the true monk is furthest 
from the spirit of today — or rather of 
yesterday. There is no ^' today," but only 
an interlude of anarchy, and the monk is 
therefore more essential at this crisis than 
the friar or the canon-regular, however 
imperative may be the demand for both, 
and the demand is insistent and clamorous. 
The friar and the canon-regular are the 
workers of visible things, and a world of 
efficiency and ^^the strenuous life," whose 
gospel is '^ get results," can measurably un- 
derstand them. The monk, cloistered, shut 

[14] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

away from active contact with the world, 
living a life of rigid abstinence, praying, 
praising God and giving himself over to 
intercession, adoration and worship, is to 
the world unthinkable, but it is at times 
like this that the world needs him most. 
Action — feverish, insistent, universal — 
has built up a world that has failed, and out 
of that failure will come the consciousness 
that the real things in life are of the spirit, 
not of the flesh, not of man but of God. 
Great and glorious works have come from 
the labours of men, whether they were 
Religious or seculars or laymen, but the 
greatest things came, not from their physi- 
cal action but from their spiritual energy; 
and though with their hands they have built 
up great fabrics of civilization and given 
them life through the energy of ordered 
intellects, the soul of these civilizations 
came as the gift of God, through His saints, 
and because of the prayers and intercessions 
and the worship of His children. The 
monk who made a desert into a garden, or 
turned a heathen people from savagery, did 
well, but he did better when prostrating 
himself in prayer in the silence of his cell, 
or when he joined with his brethren in be- 

[15] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

seeching Our Lady and the saints for their 
intercessions, or in worshipping the incar- 
nate God in the Holy Sacrament of the 
Altar. 

Our age is dying because it has lost 
spiritual energy, and therefore no longer 
knows the difference between the real and 
the false, the temporal and the eternal, be- 
tween right and wrong, and this spiritual 
energy is to be restored, not by action, but 
by the grace of God, — and by prayer alone 
is this grace given to men. We need the 
spiritual energy that emanates from the 
hushed cloisters and the dim chapels of 
brotherhoods of monks, and the invincible 
force of their intercessions. If only we 
knew that here and there, hidden in the still 
country-side, the sons of St. Benedict, as they 
were in the sixth century and the eleventh, 
were fighting, day and night, the spiritual 
battle that is more arduous even than the 
physical, we could take heart of hope where 
now is opportunity for little but despair. 

Thus far, with us, scant progress has been 
made towards the restoration of a strict 
monasticism, all our new orders having 
been formed along the lines of communities 
of canons-regular or friars. Caldey tried it, 

[ i6] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

and poor Father Ignatius even earlier, but 
Ecclesia Anglicana had no place for that 
sort of thing and Caldey was forced, by the 
logic of consistency, to make its submission 
to Rome. Even there too much time v^as 
given to preaching far afield, and to other 
extraneous objects, just as, under the Roman 
obedience, the Benedictine houses have 
largely forsaken their ordained work, in the 
interests of schools and missions, and even 
the cure of souls. The spirit of strict mo- 
nasticism seems almost wholly to have died 
away, and because of this the present peril 
of the world is increased. Unless it can be 
restored, now, without loss of time, the 
immediate future can give little hope. Un- 
fortunately to few is given the monastic 
vocation, and when it is vouchsafed, only 
too often the doubtful listener closes his 
ears, thinking, under the black inheritance 
of strenuousness, that action alone will ^^ get 
results," and that he has no right to remain 
outside the ranks of those who are everlast- 
ingly '^ up and doing." For the restoration 
of a clearer sense of spiritual values we 
must insistently pray, and if the world is 
to be saved from an era of the Dark Ages, 
sooner or later our prayer will be answered. 

[17] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

Strictly speaking, the orders of preach- 
ing friars have not been restored with us 
as yet. Rome has done better there than 
with the monks, the Dominicans having 
not only preserved their fine tradition, but 
of late acquired a new fire and fervour that 
have made them a great vitalizing power. 
In England the Society of the Divine Com- 
passion is a genuinely Franciscan founda- 
tion, and we once had here, in Father Paul, 
a possible centre for a similar work. He 
has now accepted Roman jurisdiction and 
is finding there the support of men and the 
charity denied him in his earlier days, so 
all this must be done over again, perhaps 
now, under the conditions of the present 
debacle, with better chance of success. 

The importance to us of an immediate 
restoration of the two chief orders, Fran- 
ciscan and Dominican, cannot be overesti- 
mated. Our fat and futile social organism, 
where wealth is the chief stimulus to action, 
and the first consideration in political, in- 
dustrial and social affairs, — the great sub- 
stitution of modernism for honour, courage 
and duty, — must be met by the consecrated 
poverty of the Franciscan, fearlessly de- 
nouncing a condition of things that, when 

[ i8] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

civilization returns again, will be bracketed 
in later histories with the epochs in the 
Dark Ages and during the Renaissance 
when simony had rotted the Church and 
society to a point wherefrom recovery was 
possible only by the direct intervention of 
God. In our economic-industrial state we 
are confronted by a steady progress away 
from the free association of the Middle 
Ages, back to the '' Servile State " of an- 
tiquity, with the certainty that before this is 
accomplished there will be war that is 
overt, bloody and relentless. If we are to 
escape this I believe it can only be through 
the intervention of the poor brothers of 
St. Francis, glorifying poverty, love and 
labour over and above the principles that 
are now the guiding stars of our decline. 

And what of the Dominicans? Surely, 
if ever, we need now their fearless and in- 
sistent defence of Catholic truth. It is a 
custom to call ourselves a Christian nation, 
just as before the war we spoke of the 
^^ Christian civilization" of Europe. It is 
also customary for some of us to speak of 
the Episcopal Church as a Catholic Church. 
If we speak from a lively faith our convic- 
tions do us honour, as must all faith that 

[19] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

relies on an inner conviction, not on ap- 
parent facts. In any case we are compelled 
to admit that less than half the people, of 
America even, call themselves Christians of 
one sort or another, and that there is enough 
unblushing heresy high in honour v^ithin 
the Anglican Church to bring it to ship- 
v^reck unless it meets vs^ith vigorous coun- 
teraction. Neither St. Athanasius nor St. 
Dominic nor St. Ignatius Loyola ever con- 
fronted bolder and more insidious unfaith 
and disloyalty. Just because more and more 
Presbyterians build Gothic churches, with 
stained-glass windows and twenty thousand 
dollar organs, and an increasing number of 
our clergy wear Eucharistic vestments and 
put two candles (frequently unlighted) on 
their altars, we think that all is well. 

Strong defence of the Catholic Faith and 
nothing but the Catholic Faith, asserted 
openly, everywhere and insistently, is a 
crying need of our time, and without this 
every effort at a redemption of society will 
fail, unless we are willing to count alone 
on the *^ uncovenanted mercies of God." 
There will be no new and better day for 
the world unless underneath and inter- 
penetrating present life and the social 

[20] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

fabric is the definite, dogmatic, and sac- 
ramental religion that has made and 
preserved the Catholic Church and 
Christian society from the day of Pente- 
cost. Give us once more the Order of 
Preachers of St. Dominic, bound under 
the threefold rule, with no parochial obli- 
gations, but going far and wide, in poverty 
and in the willingness for martyrdom if 
necessary, and we shall not have to ask so 
much of some of our bishops and our parish 
clergy who already are crushed under the 
weight of their special duties. 

The third class, that of the canons-regu- 
lar, really comprises the greater part of our 
Religious Orders today, at the head stand- 
ing the Society of St. John the Evangelist. 
Mission priests they truly are, and this func- 
tion is equal in importance with the others 
I have named. I say less of them now, for 
we know them better, and no word is neces- 
sary to justify them or to add to the demand 
that their numbers should be increased. 
I think, however, there is a very real de- 
mand that out of them should grow, and 
immediately, something more closely re- 
sembling the canons-regular of St. Augus- 
tine or those of St. Norbert. There should 

[21 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

be, under every bishop, a kind of diocesan 
monastery, self-governing and self-con- 
tained, but subject to the call of the bishop 
for such service as he might demand, such 
as evangelical work in heathen districts, 
temporary charge of missions, emergency 
service in parishes, and the maintenance of 
church services and parish w^ork where a 
certain minimum stipend could not be 
raised. Such houses of canons should re- 
ceive young priests immediately after or- 
dination, giving them work ^' under service 
conditions," on three-year and renewable 
vows, and also superannuated clergy who 
would form a nucleus of permanency. If 
possible young men should be trained here 
for the priesthood, and small schools of 
orphan boys might be maintained. Within 
its precincts the house would be self-govern- 
ing, with the bishop as visitor; but when a 
man was called out for active service, he 
would become the bishop's man, owing for 
the time obedience to him alone. Of course, 
there would be some arrangement whereby 
a certain number of men would always be 
left in the house for the conduct of its serv- 
ices and internal afifairs, while no man 
should be compelled to absent himself ex- 

[22] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

cept for a definite number of days at a time, 
during which period the bishop would be 
responsible for his maintenance. Every 
bishop would welcome such an engine of 
service as these diocesan monasteries would 
prove, and they seem the easiest of accom- 
plishment, since normally their vows would 
be for short periods, and a clear vocation to 
the Religious Life — the hardest thing to 
find or to be sure of — would be less neces- 
sary than in the case of monks and friars. 
In a way each house of this kind would be 
a place for the discovering and testing of 
vocations, and while many would return to 
the secular priesthood, others would pro- 
ceed to the contemplative or the active life 
of the Benedictine or Dominican or Fran- 
ciscan rules. 

Of these three definite systems, one must 
then immediately be widely strengthened 
and extended, the other two re-created. In 
the beginning the Benedictine, Franciscan, 
and Dominican rules should be accepted 
practically in their integrity. Experience 
will indicate necessary changes of adapta- 
tion, but there is none now who seems to 
possess that clear vision that would make 
possible either a new rule or the series of 

[23 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

modifications of an old one that would per- 
fectly meet the anomalous conditions of our 
time. Moreover there is in monasticism 
something akin to the Apostolical Succes- 
sion which alone guarantees a valid priest- 
hood, and this identity of motive and conti- 
nuity of tradition must be preserved. Every 
Religious since the sixth century has traced 
his lineage and his "mission" back to St. 
Benedict, and so it must always be. 
Gathered together under his patronage, 
and that of his successors, clear direction 
will be given as to the lines along which the 
necessary modification must proceed. 

One may admit, and frankly, that the 
obstacles that stand in the way of this res- 
toration and revival seem almost insuper- 
able. They are not this, but only stimulating 
to a degree. Hitherto, when the need arose, 
some one man came forward, out of ob- 
livion, to stir the world and gather together 
the necessary soldiers in God's new army. 
St Benedict, St. Berno, St. Robert of 
Molesmes, St. Stephen Harding, Chrode- 
gang of Metz, St. Bernard, St. Bruno, St. 
Francis, St. Dominic, St. Ignatius Loyola, 
all were sudden and shining lights, vivid 
and dominant personalities filled with the 

[ 24] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

Spirit of God, who had the vision, the 
power to interpret it, and the faculty of 
inspiring and leading men; and the same is 
true down even to our own day, in the per- 
sons of Father Benson, and Dom Aelred Car- 
lyle, and Father Huntington. Under them 
the task was easy of accomplishment, but 
now we confront a new situation where there 
are no precedents to guide us. The War is a 
great wonder and prolific of many revela- 
tions, but none is more staggering than this : 
that now, at a moment when the world cries 
aloud for leadership as never before, there 
is none to answer. In no land, among no 
people, in no category of life, is there to be 
found today one leader of the first class; 
not a statesman, not a philosopher, hardly 
even a soldier, and with the exception of 
the Cardinal of Malines and certain of the 
French bishops, not a Churchman of the 
first class, to see, to interpret, to arouse or 
to lead. In these latter days modernism — 
largely through its basic principles of 
Protestantism, secularism and democracy — 
has reduced all men to a dead level of in- 
feriority, from which no heroic leader lifts 
his head. 

In some way, then, we must find a sub- 

[25 ]" 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

stitute for the great creators of Christian 
monasticism, since modern civilization has 
reached a point where leaders are no longer 
produced. The dangers that follow from 
this lack of leadership are deep-seated and 
sinister. Father Benson used to say that he 
had known few men with a vocation to be 
monks, but many with a vocation to be 
Fathers Superior. The danger of mistaken 
leadership, or of joint action without leader- 
ship, are very great. It takes several years 
to test a vocation, and many years to make a 
monk. Obedience is even a harder rule to 
follow than either poverty or chastity, and 
training is as necessary for a monk or friar 
as for an engineer or a physician. I see no 
alternative but for the tested Orders we 
have, such as the S. S. J. E. and Holy Cross, 
largely to abandon their other work in 
order that they may receive into their no- 
vitiates the men who may be drawn towards 
the Religious Life, to test and train them 
even for other houses and other possible 
Rules than their own. Could they do this, 
could they make this sacrifice, they might 
become the nurseries of a complete and 
saving system of monasticism. Another 
possibility would be the organization of the 

[ 26] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

diocesan monasteries of canons-regular 
of which I have spoken, the prior in each 
case being at first novice-master as v^ell, and 
a trained Religious loaned for a few years 
for this particular work. One warning can- 
not be too often reiterated, which is that the 
certain road to failure lies through a group 
of earnest and zealous men banding to- 
gether to form a religious community, with- 
out disciplinary experience, and intent only 
on creating a centre of monastic life out of 
their own inner consciousness. We have 
had rather too much of this of late, and the 
experiment must not be repeated. 

So, then, we must begin by strengthening 
the S. S.J.E. and Holy Cross and at the 
same time restoring true monasticism 
through a revived Benedictinism, and the 
orders of Franciscan and Dominican 
preaching friars. I am increasingly con- 
vinced that the work will not and must not 
stop here. The old rules must be amended 
and developed for new orders, but the time 
has come for a further extension of the 
monastic idea. In the beginning, in the time 
of Pachomius and the hermits of the desert, 
the unit was the individual, wholly with- 
drawn from the world and isolated in his 

[ 27] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

mountain cave, or on the top of his column 
if his taste led in that direction. St. Bene- 
dict increased this unit through exalting the 
idea of human fellowship, and thereafter it 
consisted of groups, either of men or women, 
forming a centralized community. Then 
St. Ignatius Loyola increased the size of 
these groups, giving them the centralized 
control of an army. Now the time has come 
for a further extension of the great idea, not 
to the exclusion of the monastic unit or of 
the individual unit, but to supplement 
them. This new unit will be the family, 
men, women and children, in that most holy 
unit of all which is the Christian family, 
gathering together in places withdrawn 
from the world ( as the world is now, and has 
been for nearly five centuries), where they 
can build up what I like to call ^'walled 
towns," — no more of the world than is the 
monastery, but like that constituted on lines 
of order, simplicity and righteousness. 
The headlong development of modernism 
has at last resulted in a social organism 
which is identical in all parts of the world 
and apparently invincible and irreformable 
— at all events of its own motion or from 
within. In the current effort of one section 

[ 28] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

of this organism to establish by force and 
the denial of the last traces of an earlier 
Christian society its hegemony of the globe, 
the whole thing may be destroyed, as com- 
pletely as Antiquity was destroyed, and be- 
fore the end of the century we may be ek- 
ing out a precarious and savage existence 
amid the crumbling ruins of a proud civil- 
ization that has passed away. The chances 
are that this is the fate in store for the 
world, which is very given to " vain repeti- 
tions " ; but if for the moment this catastro- 
phe is delayed, as Rome sporadically re- 
vived in a measure, and with failing vigour, 
between the successive barbarian invasions, 
then the immediate question will be, What 
course are they to pursue who have read the 
writing on the wall and have seen the pres- 
ent phantasm of culture only as a silly 
mockery, incapable of self -regeneration? If 
after this war there is an interlude of com- 
placent recovery in preparation for the next 
and more devastating visitation; if some 
imbecile return is made towards the status 
quo ante, with secularism rampant in edu- 
cation and Dr. Flexner perhaps ^^ Dictator 
of Studies" ; with the present smug and cyni- 
cal substitute for democracy rampant and 

[29] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

unashamed ; with raw heresy masquerading 
under the name of '' fraternal co-operation " 
and ^^ glorious comprehensiveness"; with 
industrialism working again towards the 
final establishment of the Servile State; 
with a pseudo-evolutionary pseudo-philoso- 
phy salving the surface wounds of a van- 
ishing conscience and feeding vanity with 
the pabulum of fatuous flattery; with public 
opinion and newspapers and automobiles 
and victrolas and airplanes and movies and 
^^ great white ways," and billionaires and 
war babies and pacifism and social-service 
crusades and world conferences on unfaith 
and disorder, — together with all the myr- 
iad other engaging manifestations of the 
era of enlightenment that succeeded the 
Christian Commonwealth of the Middle 
Ages — what are we to do? 

Frankly, I think there is nothing but a 
raising of the cry ^^To your tents, O Israel!" 
and a retreat to the walled towns, that will 
be the new sanctuaries of those who are too 
proud to bend the knee to Baal: to volun- 
tary '' concentration camps," each of which 
would be a little imperium in imperio, 
an oasis of self-restraint in a desert of self- 
indulgence, where once more religion be- 

[30] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

comes something besides a social amenity 
and interpenetrates all life until again the 
bad division between Church and State is 
altogether lost. It is only in such communi- 
ties that the human scale can be regained, 
and until this replaces the imperialism that 
now dominates all action and all thought, 
it is useless to talk about civilization as a 
thing which has any contemporary exist- 
ence. Of course, each walled town would 
contain its twin kernel of life in the shape 
of a parish church and a monastery, the 
latter term covering houses both for men 
and women; therefore, even with this ex- 
tension of the monastic idea, we shall need 
our cloisters of the olden type, and even 
more than otherwise. Of course, few of us 
have or will have the vocation to the Re- 
ligious Life, and we shall need to preserve 
and restore the old and holy institution of 
the family. Therefore, if we are to be 
driven out, not into, but from, the wilder- 
ness man has made with his clever hands 
and cleverer brain, we must have our walled 
towns ; but these can assemble better around 
the walls of some religious house than they 
can be created by fiat, while itself must be 
always the centre of spiritual energy and 

[31 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

the final refuge of those who have become 
weary of living even in the paradisaical 
peace of a walled town. 

From every point of view the restoration 
and expansion of the consecrated Religious 
Life is the demand most clamorous today. 
Not that it may supersede the secular priest- 
hood, but supplement and strengthen it; not 
that it may hold up an ideal of asceticism in 
place of that forever consecrated by the 
Holy Family of Nazareth, but by its own 
voluntary self-sacrifice, make the human 
family more secure in its place; not that it 
may destroy but that it may fulfil. 

Five centuries ago, and a thousand, and 
fifteen hundred, and two thousand, the 
world in its periodical agony called aloud 
for aid, and men put all behind them and 
answered, in conformity with the will of 
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who 
first, for the saving of the world, voluntarily 
established for Himself and for those who 
would follow Him, the threefold vows 
of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience and 
added for full measure. Brotherhood and 
Work. Again the same call goes forth, 
and now, or later, the same answer must 
be made and will be made. If to any 

[32] 



MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS 

of you the call has ever come, ^' Sell that 
thou hast; take up thy cross and follow Me/' 
he must make sure of two things: first, that 
the call is indeed of God; and second, that 
even at the price of life itself, it does not 
go unheeded. 



[33] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND 
THE FUTURE 

SACRAMENTALISM is the Divine law of 
life and therefore it is the essential 
element, of the very esse of Catholic 
faith and Catholic philosophy, securing 
them in absolute isolation from all ethnic 
religions and the many inventions of man- 
made philosophies. 

Here is the definition of a sacrament by 
the greatest expositor of sacramental phi- 
losophy, Hugh of St. Victor: '^The sacra- 
ment is the corporal or material element 
set out sensibly, representing from its simili- 
tude, signifying from its institution, and 
containing from its sanctification, some 
invisible and spiritual grace." Then the 
greatest pure intellect, St. Thomas Aquinas, 
proceeds, in speaking of the Holy Sacra- 
ment of the Altar: ^^All the other sacra- 
ments seem to be ordained to this one as 
to their end, for it is manifest that the 
sacrament of Order is ordained to the con- 
secration of the Eucharist; and the sacra- 

[34] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

ment of Baptism to the reception of the 
Eucharist; while a man is perfected by 
Confirmation so as not to fear to abstain 
from this sacrament. By Penance and Ex- 
treme Unction, man is prepared to receive 
the Body of Christ worthily, and Matri- 
mony, at least in its signification, touches 
this sacrament; in so far as it signifies the 
union of Christ and the Church, of which 
union the Eucharist is a figure." 

As, from the creation of the world, it has 
been a world of sacraments, so, from Pen- 
tecost, the Church has worked in and by 
the Seven Sacraments; it would be almost 
possible to say that the Church has existed 
for its sacraments, since these are the means 
ordained by God for particularizing the 
Redemption of Calvary in the person of 
every man, reconciling to Himself each 
who will and redeeming him from that 
slavery to matter in which he was bound 
through his inheritance. There is no 
Church without the sacraments. The apos- 
tolic ministry itself is ordered and per- 
petuated simply as the means of preserving 
the validity of the sacraments of Penance 
and of the Body and Blood of Christ, and 
as St. Thomas has said, even Penance is a 

[35 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

means towards the Holy Sacrament of the 
Altar which is ^^ the end and aim of all the 
sacraments," 

I conceive that the time has come for us 
to take thought of the bearing of this on the 
question of our relationship to those, out- 
side the communion of the Catholic Church, 
who deny the sacraments as such, accepting 
conditionally two of them only, and these 
simply as symbols or commemorative cere- 
monies. I conceive, also, that this scrutiny 
should extend to more intimate circles of 
affiliation. The famous Lambeth ^'Quadri- 
lateral " is fatally weak in that it imposes 
the fact of the Apostolic Ministry without 
reference to its significance and its reason 
for being. What excuse has it except that 
it ensures the making of priests who can 
administer the sacrament of Penance, act as 
the agencies for the performing of the 
Divine miracle in Holy Mass; ofifer the 
very Body and Blood of Christ a Sacrifice 
before God, and to these ends ensure the 
unbroken continuance of a Catholic priest- 
hood until the end of time. 

Acceptance of the threefold ministry, 
and of the fact of Apostolic succession 
through the laying on of hands on the part 

[36] 



SACRAAIENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

of those who claim this tactual succession, 
if it did not carry with it a true acceptance 
of the Catholic doctrine of the nature, and 
efficacy, and mode of operation of the 
Seven Sacraments, would be but a still fur- 
ther extension of heresy closely approach- 
ing sacrilege. What we who are Catholics 
want and work for and pray for is unity in 
faith and belief even if there is some diver- 
sity in practice. We have come to the 
parting of the ways and can no longer 
follow a path that has led to substantial 
unity of practice with unlimited diversity 
in belief. 

It is for this reason that we can take no 
further interest in an empty conformity; 
that the ^^ glorious comprehensiveness" of 
last-century apologetic leaves us cold, and 
that at last we are coming to consider 
whether it is possible for any portion of the 
Church to remain longer half Protestant 
and half Catholic, mingled indifferently of 
those who accept and those who deny the 
Catholic doctrine of the sacraments. It is 
here that the line of demarcation exists; not 
between those who maintain the form of the 
threefold ministry and those who prefer 
the congregational polity; not between the 

[37] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

adherents of a more or less historical liturgy 
and those who take unto themselves many 
inventions of curious and novel ritual; not 
between the Protestant Episcopalian and 
the Protestant Congregationalist whatever 
his sect and name, but between those who, 
on the one hand, accept the dogma and 
philosophy of sacramentalism, with the 
Seven Sacraments in their entirety, and 
the supreme sacrament of Holy Mass as 
the crown and consummation of all; and, on 
the other hand, those who reject the sacra- 
ment of Penance, turn the sacrament of 
Matrimony into a civil contract, ignore the 
sacraments of Confirmation and Unction, 
and recognize in the Sacrament of the Altar 
neither Sacrifice nor Real Presence, but 
only a symbolical commemoration of a fait 
accompli. 

The division lies here and it is impassi- 
ble. On the one hand lies Protestantism, 
on the other, Catholicism, and the two can 
never mix. On the one hand is that vast 
body of men in communion with the Apos- 
tolic See of Rome, the heterogeneous, if 
not heterodox, units of the fast crumbling 
Eastern Church, and — ourselves. On the 
other, all the one hundred and fifty-seven 

[ 38 ] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

varieties of sects, together with a probable 
majority of the bishops, clergy and people 
of the Anglican and the Protestant Epis- 
copal Churches. The line of cleavage lies 
here and not elsewhere, and nothing is 
gained by a denial of the fact. 

It is not along this line, however, that I 
wish to speak; the place of the sacraments 
in Catholic Christianity, their essential 
nature, the supreme significance of the 
Sacrament of the Altar and its unique 
value devotionally, are all, for us, matters 
of common knowledge and need no argu- 
ment. That, as St. Thomas says, " this 
sacrament is the end and consummation of 
all the sacraments," we know, but I do 
not think we sufficiently realize that 
behind lies a great, a complete system of 
philosophy, developed by, or revealed 
through, supreme exponents of Christian 
thought; a philosophy that underlies all the 
great Christian centuries, explaining their 
achievements, revealing their quality, mak- 
ing manifest their singularity in human life. 
A philosophy that is also a sufficient ex- 
position of the universe, and that has been 
rejected through the last five-century epoch 
of modernism in favour of a materialistic 

[39] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

system called Evolution, with the result we 
see before us in the progressive collapse, 
in horror, in ignominy and dishonour, of 
what we have called modern civilization. 
In an absolutely real sense it is possible to 
say that the rejection of sacramentalism 
and of the Catholic sacraments, in philoso- 
phy and religion, is the root cause of the 
war. And the corollary follows close upon ; 
that is to say, it is only through the abandon- 
ment of evolutionary philosophy and a re- 
turn, in spirit and in act, to an explicit and 
inclusive sacramentalism, that we can look 
for the energizing force that will enable 
us to build up a new world on the wide 
ruins of a great failure. 

I would not minimize the great work we 
have to do in bringing Ecclesia Anglicana 
to recognize, accept and avow Holy Mass 
as the central, supreme and unique Opus 
Dei in her visible life and action; this can- 
not be too strongly emphasized, nor the 
equal duty in bringing again explicit rec- 
ognition of the Mass as Sacrifice as well as 
Communion. The two things where effort 
should now be centred are, I believe, the 
establishing of Reservation as the standard 
practice in all churches, and the preaching 

[40] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

of the Sacrifice of the Mass. Reservation 
by Episcopal tolerance, either as the result 
of good nature, indifference, or the working 
of ^^the principle of comprehensiveness," is 
unworthy and hardly to be tolerated except 
faute de mieux. I am not sure that the en- 
forcing of the doctrine of the Eucharistic 
Sacrifice is not more important. Both work 
towards establishing the Real Presence of 
Christ in the Sacrament, and this is funda- 
mental both from the standpoint of religion 
and of philosophy. St. Augustine has said : 
'^ Christ was sacrificed once in Himself, 
and yet He is sacrificed daily in the Sacra- 
ment," and St. Thomas, with that splendid 
lucidity that makes him " Doctor Angeli- 
cus," ^^This Sacrament is both a sacrifice 
and a sacrament; it has the nature of a sac- 
rifice inasmuch as it is offered up, and it 
has the nature of a sacrament inasmuch as 
it is received. And therefore it has the 
eft'ect of a sacrament in the recipient and 
the effect of a sacrifice in the offerer, or in 
them for whom it is offered." 

Sacrament and Sacrifice, the two great 
realities the world had cast away during 
that era that is now commg to its unhonoured 
end through such a cataclysm as has not 

[41 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

happened since the fall of Rome. Through 
the Great Purgation of War and the univer- 
sal testing of souls, the reality of sacrifice 
is coming back to a world that thought it 
could do without, but the reality of sacra- 
mentalism is still far from the minds of 
men. Still the world is enmeshed in the 
tangled web of a false philosophy; deep in 
the morass of dull materialism it struggles 
vainly, led to its betrayal by the ignis fatuus 
of an iridescent intellectualism. From 
this nemesis it must be saved if a new Dark 
Ages is to be avoided. 

Let me quote again from Hugh of St. 
Victor, a great philosopher of the twelfth 
century, one who is little known but who is, 
I think, not only the perfect expositor of 
sacramentalism, but as great a philosopher 
under Christianity as Plato under paganism : 

" There was a certain wisdom that seemed 
such to them that knew not the true wisdom. 
The world found it and began to be pufifed 
up, thinking itself great in this. Confid- 
ing in its wisdom it became presumptu- 
ous and boasted it would attain the highest 
wisdom. And it made itself a ladder of 
the face of creation. . . , Then those things 
which were seen were known, and there 

[42] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

were other things which were not known; 
and through those which were manifest 
they expected to reach those that were 
hidden. And they stumbled and fell into 
the falsehoods of their own imagining. 
... So God made foolish the wisdom of 
this world; and He pointed out another 
wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was 
not. For it preached Christ crucified, in 
order that truth might be sought in hu- 
mility. But the world despised it, wishing 
to contemplate the works of God, which He 
had made a source of wonder, and it did 
not wish to venerate what He had set for 
imitation, neither did it look to its own 
disease, seeking medicine in piety; but pre- 
suming on a false health, it gave itself over 
with vain curiosity to the study of alien 
things." 

I know not if there is anywhere a better 
description than this, of our own world of 
modernism that reached the summit of its 
ascending curve in the first decade of the 
present century. For four hundred years it 
had been progressively abandoning that 
sacramental idea that progressively had 
grown during the fifteen antecedent cen- 
turies under that constant and cumulative 

[43 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

revelation that was promised and given to 
the Catholic Church. So in the end the 
world ^^ stumbled and fell into the falsehoods 
of its own imagining," until '' God made 
foolish the wisdom of this world" by per- 
mitting it to develop its logical conclusion 
in world war and irremediable ruin. 

Any future of decency and righteousness 
must be based on a renunciation of " the 
wisdom of this world," which is material- 
ism substantiated by the heresy of Evolu- 
tion ; so much of the Church as has adhered 
to sacramentalism, or recovered it after the 
episode of the Reformation, holds in its 
hands the keys to this future, and it will be 
largely, if not primarily, through the rein- 
forcement of sacramentalism that the future 
may be assured. For us then, and for all 
Catholics, devotion to the Holy Sacrament 
of the Altar opens out into something far 
more than doctrine and worship; into the 
very philosophy and way of thought and 
mode of life that must condition society 
after the war. 

We hear much of a new knowledge of 
Mediaevalism and of a Mediaeval revival. 
This is far more than a question of archi- 
tectural style, more than an escape from 

[44] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

contemporary imperialism into the free 
democracy of the Middle Ages, more than 
a restoration of the Mediaeval industrial 
system. It is in effect a return to the re- 
ligion and the philosophy of the Catholic 
ages which made possible Gothic art and 
the guild system and the social unit of 
human scale. 

The world is ready for the great return. 
In four years war has shattered the whole 
brummagem fabric of modernism. In- 
dustrial civilization, imperial nationalism, 
industry and finance, the intellectual cri- 
terion, automatic evolution, the omnipo- 
tence of education and environment, the 
possibility of earthly perfectibility for man, 
all have gone on the pyre of great burning, 
and only the penitential ashes remain. At 
the very moment when the whole world ac- 
claimed triumphant modernism as victor 
over the slaughtered superstitions of the 
past, behold a great wonder; the casting 
down into the dust of the idols of brass and 
the naked showing of the clumsy feet of 
clay; yea, the world is ready, and more than 
ready, and the proclamation of old truth, 
long forgotten, will not fall on deaf ears. 

The whole world is sacramental, and the 

[45] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 



Seven of the Catholic Church are but the 
sign and symbol of the Universe. Let me 
quote again from Hugh of St. Victor. 
'' God set for man as a sign the sacraments 
of his salvation, in order that w^hosoever 
would apprehend them w^ith right faith and 
firm hope might, though under the yoke, 
have some fellov^ship vs^ith freedom. . . . 
For as there is body and soul in man, and in 
Scripture the letter and the sense, so in 
every sacrament there is a visible external 
which may be handled and the invisible 
within which is believed and taught." And 
finally ^^The spirit was created for God's 
sake; the body for the spirit's sake, and the 
world for the body's sake, so that the spirit 
might be subject to God, the body to the 
spirit, and the world to the body." 

Let us go on from this. Life as we know 
it, the life of this world, is the union of 
matter and spirit; and matter is not spirit, 
nor spirit matter, nor is one a mode of the 
other but they are two different creatures. 
Severance of matter and spirit, of body and 
soul, is death. That ancient heresy that 
matter is a figment of fancy, is re-vamped 
in these latter days for the wonder of delec- 
tation of disillusioned Protestants. It is 

[46] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

a symbol of death. That modern heresy 
ingeniously devised for the infidel and the 
materialist, that spirit is only a mode of 
matter automatically evolved through bio- 
logical processes, is also a symbol of death, 
if it is not death itself, or perhaps that awful 
and mysterious thing, '' the sin against the 
Holy Ghost." Materialism on the one 
hand, transcendentalism on the other, when 
carried to their logical conclusion, are 
denial of the law of life. All the world is 
but the redemption and transfiguring of 
matter through the interpenetration and 
the indwelling of spirit. We cannot know 
spirit except through the accidents of mat- 
ter; we may not know matter except as it is 
irradiated by spirit. Says St. Thomas, 
^' Human nature is such it has to be led by 
things corporeal and sensible to things 
spiritual and intangible," and that con- 
temporary but unconscious follower of 
Aquinas, Henri Bergson, echoes him when 
he says, ^^The intellect is characterized by 
a natural inability to comprehend life" 
^^for — we cannot too often repeat it — in- 
telligence and instinct are turned in opposite 
directions, the former towards inert matter, 
the latter towards life. Intelligence by 

[47] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

means of science, which is its work, will 
deliver up to us more and more completely 
the secret of physical operation; of life it 
brings us, and moreover only claims to 
bring us, a translation in terms of inertia." 
^^ Intuition" (a term chosen by Bergson to 
express what Cardinal Newman called 
'' the spiritual power of assent," and not an 
altogether happy one) is alone able to 
afford us, through material mediumship, 
some adumbration of the infinite. As this 
great modern philosopher has said with 
singular clarity, ^' On our personality, on 
our liberty, on the place we occupy in the 
whole of nature, on our origin, and perhaps 
also on our destiny, it throws a light feeble 
and vacillating, but it none the less pierces 
the darkness of the night in which the in- 
tellect leaves us." Seers and prophets and 
the greatest of artists are indeed so closely 
in touch at times with pure spirit that they 
seem absolved from the necessities of or- 
dinary men, receiving inspiration directly 
and without the intervention of material 
things, but this relationship is unconscious; 
they are channels, media, for the outpour- 
ing of Divine grace upon others than them- 
selves. In a sense, then, they become the 

[48] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

material element in the sacramental union 
of form and spirit. Infrequently appear 
men and women who in the state of ecstacy 
undeniably transcend human limitations, 
becoming for the moment united to God 
after a mystical fashion, but they are singu- 
lar episodes well without the common lim- 
itations of men. For man as man the fact 
remains, that as he is compact of body and 
soul in a unity only dissolved by death, so for 
him there is no approach to the Absolute save 
through the mediumship of material things. 
During the great Christian centuries of 
the Middle Ages this fact was universally 
understood and accepted. As Mr. Porter 
says in his recent book, '' Beyond Architect- 
ure," ^' To the mediaeval mind reality was 
but a symbol of unreality, matter but a re- 
flection of the immaterial. Our earth 
became only a shadow of Heaven." Yes, 
but by symbolism matter became glorified ; 
through its conjunction with spirit it be- 
came, as does the body of man, " the temple 
of the Holy Ghost." All the world of men 
and women, flowers and forests and kindly 
beasts, of changing seasons and mysterious 
elemental forces, became but an antitype 
of the Incarnation. Gothic art of every 

[49] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

sort is as great as it is because of this. What 
were Reims once, and Soissons, before their 
martyrdom, but the transfiguring of stone 
and metal and wood; dead matter delved 
from the ground or hewn out of the forest, 
through the labour of man exalted into 
forms of absolute beauty that, because of 
this loving labour had been transformed into 
gifts worthy of giving back to God, and into 
a mysterious creation that in the words of 
Abbot Suger of St. Denis ^^was neither 
wholly of earth nor wholly of Heaven but 
a mystical blending of both," the very rev- 
elation to men of that which was beyond 
their grasp but not beyond their reach — 
the Beatific Vision of that absolute truth 
and absolute beauty that are God in His 
Heaven. It is no accident that Gothic art 
and sacramental philosophy and the ex- 
altation of the Blessed Sacrament synchro- 
nized in these years of the Middle Ages, for 
they are varied manifestations of the same 
thing. It is no accident that the destruction 
of Gothic art and the acceptance of a ma- 
terialistic philosophy and denial of the In- 
carnation have synchronized in these later 
years, for here also they are varied mani- 
festations of the same thing. 

[ 50] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

Out of the Renaissance came the exalta- 
tion of the intellectual test and standard; 
out of Protestantism the denial of the 
reality of the sacraments and of sacramen- 
talism. The revolutions of the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries enforced the new 
doctrines and spread them wide, and the in- 
dustrial standards and methods of the last 
century have finally separated spirit from 
matter, cast it out into the limbo of ex- 
ploded superstitions, and left only dead 
matter for our desire and acceptance — 
money, material advantage and force. 

We look with disgust on the hedonistic 
revels of a dying Roman Imperialism; we 
turn in ofifence from the sordid corruption 
of the last years of the Dark Ages ; we hold 
up to scorn and derision the gross licentious- 
ness of Church and State in the Italy of the 
fifteenth century; but no one of these 
epochs, base as it is, records a lower fall 
than the manners and methods and morals 
of our own modernism when at last the 
severance had been accomplished and 
matter, unregenerated and unredeemed, 
had become Lord of the World, material- 
ism its sacrosanct religion and its law of 
life. 

[SI ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

The curse of this great apostacy lay over 
all the peoples that in predominant num- 
bers had turned from the Catholic faith and 
had abandoned sacramental philosophy: on 
England, France, America, but chiefest of 
all on Germany, for there the process had 
begun and there it had reached its flower. 
Great in the eyes of men were the results 
achieved through this comprehensive apos- 
tacy; wealth without limit (though con- 
fined to the few) ; ingenious and amazing 
machines myriad in number and endlessly 
turning out more wealth ; forces of nature 
harnessed and made the meek bond-slaves 
of men; intellectual capacity raised to new 
levels of competence and capable of justify- 
ing anything so long as it diverged suf- 
ficiently from ancient and once honourable 
standards. There was hardly a man in the 
spring of 1914 who would have denied that 
modernism had gloriously triumphed, and 
only a scattered few who doubted its eter- 
nity. Then came the epic catastrophe when 
in an hour the card-castle had crumbled 
about our ears. The efficiency of material 
imperialism swept back the inefficiency of 
an imperialized democracy, and so it has 
continued for four years. The boasted bar- 

[ 52] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

riers against war or dissolution, erected one 
behind the other by finance, capitalism, a 
socialistic and organized proletariat, uni- 
versal education, popular government, in- 
tellectual and spiritual emancipation, broke, 
toppled and dissolved, forming only van- 
ishing and impotent ramparts against a 
triumphant Force released from all bond- 
age to moral standards and spiritual laws. 

What this has meant in national conduct 
on the part of the thus far triumphant 
power, in broken oaths and cynical lying, 
in sanctioned savagery, and beastliness that 
balks the most morbid imagination, I need 
not rehearse; it is part of the history of all 
time. We have been told that all this is the 
pathological phenomenon of a small clan 
of aristocratic rulers, and that the people 
themselves, the good, kind, Teutonic peas- 
ants and workmen, have no part therein, 
and must be coddled and humoured so that 
they may be encouraged to cast ofif the alien 
and official incubus under which they 
groan in heavy bondage. We are told, but 
we do not believe ; for during the last three 
years the revelations of popular character 
have been convincing, and we know that 
what we are fighting is a supreme autoc- 

[53 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

racy, and more : it is a homogeneous group 
of peoples, and more : it is a motive and a 
force let loose in the world that reaches its 
tentacles out into all nations, and that must 
be destroyed, root and branch, if society is to 
survive, and such civilization as we have 
be not cut off by a new Dark Ages. What 
it is they mean, among the people them- 
selves, is well set forth in a very recent Ger- 
man newspaper, where it is said (but not 
for foreign consumption) : '^ Fraud, em- 
bezzlement, peculation, deceit, immorality, 
lust, these unhappily are the characteris- 
tics of German domestic life of the present 
day. . . . Our returning victorious warriors 
will be confronted with a terrible disillu- 
sionment, and our children will look back 
on these years as a time of rampant barbar- 
ism, of unchecked criminality and utter 
absence of morals." 

It is to this that the new philosophy 
and the non-religion of the post-mediaeval 
epoch have led us; to the war that scourges 
the whole world, to a break-down of moral 
sense and of right standards that make such 
a war, its antecedents and its concomitants, 
a possibility. There are many streams of 
tendency threading the last four centuries 

[ 54 ] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

that have brought this about, but we can 
no longer escape the conviction that it 
is through Protestantism, and especially 
through the Protestant denial of Catholic 
sacramentalism, that the strongest element 
finds its course. 

This is inevitably the case. Through 
sacramentalism v^e see the sanctity of ma- 
terial things through their function as a 
vehicle of the spirit, as through the Incar- 
nation v^e realize the sanctity of the human 
body that is its dwelling-place. There is 
nothing so mean that it may not take on 
glory through the power of the Holy Ghost, 
nothing that cannot serve as a channel of 
Divinity. Through sacramentalism we un- 
derstand how all this finality we call the 
Absolute shines to us in symbol through 
all created things, so that only by their 
mediation may we lay hold on the mystical 
vision of God. Of all this the world, as 
such, has known nothing during the last 
century. Material things have been this 
and no more: dead lumps and clods, from 
the gold that has become the one desire of 
man, to the human body bought and sold and 
outraged as utterly as under black African 
slavery. The spiritual ideal that is the life 

[55] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

of man, isolated from its material symbol, 
has ceased to manifest itself, and is there- 
fore denied save as a by-product of biologi- 
cal processes. Even the pledged word, in 
itself a just symbol, even a ^'sacramental," 
has been degraded, and by intellectual proc- 
esses untouched by the fire of spiritual per- 
ception, has been proved no more than the 
evanescent formula of a discredited epoch. 

There are two alternatives, sacramental- 
ism or materialism. In the great civiliza- 
tion of the Middle Ages, as this had its 
flowering and in a sense its sacramental ex- 
pression in Reims Cathedral and Soissons, 
we may see what the one leads to; in the 
bestial destruction of Reims and Soissons — 
an act symbolical in itself — we see the 
significant issue of the other. 

It would be an interesting task to take 
up one by one the seven sacraments of 
Catholicism and show how each has, be- 
yond its own special power, a great signifi- 
cance for us at this black and portentous 
moment of the world, but this would mean 
not an essay but a volume. Each one of us 
can, however, make his own application 
of each sacramental verity — Baptism, 
Confirmation. Penance, Orders, Matri- 

[56] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

mony, Unction, and the Holy Eucharist. 
Poignantly and perfectly each expresses 
some vital truth, but of them all the last, 
the crown and consummation of all the sac- 
raments and of all sacramentalism, has the 
most sublime significance. Think for a 
moment of this great mystery: the bread 
and wine of man's natural food transformed 
in a moment by the power of God and at 
the hands of His priest into the very Body 
and Blood of the Saviour of the World, to 
be at the same time the spiritual food of 
man and the everlasting Sacrifice for the 
sins of the whole world. The faith that 
accepts this, even though it were universal, 
might not abolish sin or avert war, for man 
is man always and works after his own kind. 
It would prevent such a war as this, and 
such civilization as that out of which the 
war came, for out of sacramental faith and 
practice came honour, and truth and 
sacrifice. 

And through the war they are coming 
back. The perfidy and dishonour of the 
universal enemy rebuild in the desperate 
crusaders of the new age, honour and stead- 
fastness and righteous hate. Out of the 
broken oaths and the cynical duplicity and 

[57] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

cold and Machiavellian craft of Teuton- 
ism comes a new sense of truth and justice 
for those who are aligned against it. Into 
a world of hedonism and self-indulgence 
and gross individualism the meaning of 
sacrifice returns in the thunders of unex- 
ampled war, and men, women, children, 
in the trenches, on the high seas, at home, 
in garden and workshop, find in the su- 
preme sacrifice that is theirs to offer, the 
revelation of their own souls. 

The world must be made over anew, in 
every big and every little thing; made over 
politically, socially, industrially, economi- 
cally, educationally; but these reforms, 
drastic as they must be, well-intentioned as 
they may be, will prove only mechanistic 
and disappointing devices, doomed to follow 
in the long sequence of nineteenth-century 
nostrums and panaceas, unless the great 
fundamental reform is achieved in the 
spirit, impulse and vision of all the peoples 
of the world, the gaining back of the char- 
acter-quality that can make success to come 
out of indififerent means, and assure to 
wise measures their full fruition: and this 
lies in the sphere of what we call religion 
and philosophy. 

[ 58 ] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

We may honestly strive to ^'make the 
world safe for democracy," to guarantee 
the self-determination of all peoples, to 
shake ofif from the throat of human society 
the clutching fangs of imperial finance and 
Jewish internationalism, to destroy the five- 
century-long antithesis between capital and 
labour; we may strive even to restore in all 
things the unit of human scale — and our 
labours will go for little unless we can gain 
again the unity of the Catholic Faith and 
the dynamic force of sacramental, which 
is to say Christian, philosophy. 

It is no exaggeration to say that the future 
of the world lies with those who unite in un- 
flinching devotion to the Blessed Sacrament 
as verily and indeed the Communion of 
the true Body and Blood of Christ, and as 
well the eternal Sacrifice offered of God to 
God for the sins of the world, and equally 
for the quick and the dead. It is not only as 
a solemn and supreme method of devotion, 
it is not merely as the central, unique and 
essential act of worship no other device of 
clever ingenuity can supplant, that we work 
and pray for the restoration of Holy Mass 
to its Divinely ordained position; it is be- 
cause it is the crux and the key to all that 

[59] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

follows after, all that the world has aban- 
doned to its grievous peril, and that must 
be restored if it is to continue. Reunion 
and unity centre around this, and not in 
^' World Conferences on Faith and Order," 
^^ Lambeth Quadrilaterals," or half-hearted 
schemes of compromise and approximation. 
'^ It is the Mass that matters," and this once 
won the rest is easy. And this is true of 
fields far beyond that of religion itself. I 
repeat, in the end the whole solution of the 
world-crisis lies here, and if by a miracle 
the whole world were to wake up and find 
itself Catholic in the sense in which it was 
Catholic from the year 975 to the year 1305, 
the future would hold for us clear assur- 
ance of the quick evanishment of our 
crowding problems and the swift achieve- 
ment of a new era of righteous life. The 
miracle may be wrought, for miracles are 
now the only things on which we can 
rationally count v^ith reasonable assur- 
ance; but we cannot act on that assumption, 
and therefore we are bound to labour 
consistently, if desperately, for bringing 
about the acceptable change by human 
means. 

In so fighting it is, I think, necessary 
[60] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

that we should now make an act of renun- 
ciation of our fear of words, for it is fear 
of words rather than of things that has left 
us weak and has paralysed our efforts. The 
two words we have most feared are Mass 
and Sacrifice. Let us fear them no longer, 
but use them frankly as avowing our honest 
faith. Let us use the word Mass because 
it is a symbol of that unity in the communion 
of the Apostolic See towards which we 
must look as the end of all projects of re- 
union. Because it means not only Com- 
munion but also Sacrifice, and therefore 
expresses the dual nature of this sacrament. 
Because it definitely excludes the interpre- 
tation of this sacrament, as no more than 
a symbolical commemoration, that is in- 
tolerable to the Catholic Faith. Let us 
frankly avow our adherence to the historic 
doctrine of the sacrificial nature of this 
sacrament, since without this there is no 
unmutilated Catholicity resting on the un- 
broken tradition and belief of the Catholic 
Church. 

Both the great realities that are signified 
by these two words have their close ap- 
plication to the present world crisis. Holy 
Communion and Holy Sacrifice both lie 

[6i ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

closer to the sickness that has overwhelmed 
society than we ourselves are disposed to 
think, while for the great majority of men 
any hint of association is preposterous. 

Materialism cannot remain the law of 
life, the lodestar of human endeavour; it 
cannot even exist in a world where all ma- 
terial things are seen to be only evanescent 
phenomena, where matter itself is recog- 
nized not only as the vehicle of the spirit 
and a means towards the achieving of 
spiritual vision, but also as impermanent 
world-stufif out of which, by essential 
transformation, something else is made, 
that thing for the achieving of which life, 
as we know life on this earth, exists. How 
thin, futile, inconsiderable, in the light 
of this vision, seem all those material 
ends and those material methods which 
for so many generations have been the 
base ideals of men. The sinister politics 
and oblique diplomacy, the delusive phi- 
losophies of evolutionists and pragmatists, 
the subterranean machinations of high 
finance and ^^big business," the gross op- 
portunism of social systems, the ignoble 
warfare of industrial civilization, all show 

[62] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

hollow and valueless in the light of spirit- 
ual revelation as this comes brokenly to us 
through the red tempest of war. Sooner 
or later, whether through victory or defeat 
(it is inevitable whatever the issue; the dif- 
ference lies only in time), we shall confront 
the giant task of rebuilding a world. Let 
us see that our foundations are secure, for 
without them, deep-laid and firmly fixed, 
no superstructure of human ingenuity will 
stand for a generation. 

Greater than the deliberations of Peace 
Conferences with their paper treaties, 
greater than new constitutions and novel 
frontiers, greater than political and indus- 
trial and social devices sprung from the 
fertile brains of ingenious artificers, will 
be the determinations of religion and phi- 
losophy. Thus far, since the battle cry of 
Armageddon sounded on those last days 
of July, 1914, neither has played a prom- 
inent or even a creditable part. From the 
Cardinal of Malines to the priest soldiers 
in the trenches and the chaplains of many 
faiths, there are endless instances of indi- 
vidual nobility and heroism, and the list of 
martyrs and confessors increases daily. For 
the Church itself, whether Roman, An- 

[63 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

glican, or Eastern, very little can be said; 
and less is said. The ominous fact is that 
it was and is a negligible factor. The same 
is true of the Protestant sects in their cor- 
porate capacity, whether they are the obe- 
dient sycophants of German autocracy 
or the free associations of England and 
America. Organized religion, Catholic 
and Protestant, has not only failed to meet 
the crisis in any measurable degree, or to 
adapt itself to the enormous agony of un- 
counted millions, it has sunk out of sight 
so far as world-forces are concerned, and 
its word, if uttered, would now go unheard. 
In the greatest cataclysm since the fall of 
Rome the Church has ceased to function 
as an operative, public force. 

So with philosophy. In Germany the 
men once so inordinately famous (I know 
not why) just before the war, the Euckens 
and their kind, have become the apologists 
of dishonour. The greatest figure in France, 
Bergson, is silent before a crisis he cannot 
meet, and among English-speaking people 
we have only a Father Figgis or a Chester- 
ton to fight through the blind chaos in the 
desperate endeavour to find some signs of a 
philosophy of life that may clear the way 

[64] 



SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE 

for that which is to come. Not alone were 
we unprepared in a political, industrial, eco- 
nomic and military sense to meet the assault 
of a conscienceless and efficient enemy, our 
unpreparedness extended equally to the cate- 
gories of philosophy and religion, and we 
suffer, and may in the end fail, quite as 
much on account of one as of the 
other. 

Thus far we have failed, but we can al- 
ways look to the future, and it is never too 
late for amendment, even for the winning 
of salvation. I cannot presume to speak 
for the Church of Rome, whose defects 
and delinquencies are other than our own. 
I do not propose to speak for Protestantism, 
which must act in accordance with its own 
principles, which are so different from 
those of Catholicism that no common 
ground appears. For ourselves, members 
of the Anglican Church, I see the need 
of new and radically different action along 
many lines; but none is more vital, more 
immediate in its necessity, more closely 
connected v/ith the vast problem of the 
World after the War, than those I postu- 
lated at the beginning of this essay: sac- 
ramentalism as the basic philosophical 

[6s ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

system of the Church; the Seven Sacra- 
ments as its fundamental mode of operation ; 
Holy Mass as the central fact of its wor- 
ship and its Divine strength, and the real- 
ity and efficacy of the Eucharist Sacrifice. 



[66] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL 
NECESSITY 

THEY are called wise who put things 
in their right order and control them 
well." So begins the first sentence 
of the ^^Summa Contra Gentiles" of St. 
Thomas Aquinas. The implied condemna- 
tion of those who establish false standards of 
comparative value and ill control those er- 
roneously jfixed, holds today as it held in the 
year 1262, even though now they may be 
a preponderant multitude where then they 
were a minor if conspicuous faction. 

^^To put things in their right order and 
control them well"; is not this the essence 
of wisdom and the secret of righteous life? 
To weigh and assort all things, estimating 
the value of each in relation to all others 
and to eternal truth; to exalt and pursue 
the things that are great and admirable and 
everlasting; to cast down and reject those 
things that are insignificant and transitory 
and without value. This is the substance 
of wisdom, as it is the object of each man's 

[67] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

living; that he may control them well, both 
the great things and the small, not with 
fumbling hands and by unstable minds 
swayed by every wind of doctrine aroused 
by Roger Bacon's vulgi sensus imperitijhut 
with the firm grasp of mastership directed 
by an intrepid and reasonable mind. 

This is that Wisdom that is the eternal 
goal of intellectual man, and Philosophia 
the way of that everlasting pilgrimage. 
^' Philosophy," says the great Cardinal of 
Malines, ^'is the science of the totality of 
things. The particular sciences are di- 
rected to groups of objects more or less 
restricted; philosophy, the general science, 
regards the sum-total of reality." So it ap- 
pears that philosophy alone enables us to 
^^put things in their right order" when 
the accidents and illusions of life, and the 
narrow outlook of the single sciences, have 
confused all relations; and without a right 
philosophy we are as those of whom Hugh 
of St. Victor speaks who ^'stumbled and 
fell into the falsehoods of their own 
imaginings." 

But the boon of a right philosophy is not 
the wages of a delving intellectuality nor 
is it the laurel crown of profound erudition. 

[68] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

They that are thus furnished may attain the 
highest good, as Aristotle and St. Thomas 
Aquinas, but achievement is granted also 
to the humble and the unlearned ; the shep- 
herd on the hills, the poet in bitter exile, 
the monk in his forgotten cloister. There 
is much truth in the words of Friar Bacon: 
"All the wisdom of philosophy is created 
by God and given to the philosophers, and 
it is Himself that illuminates the minds of 
men in all wisdom." This is necessarily 
so ; from Aristotle to the modern Aquinas, 
Henri Bergson, every philosopher who can 
justly claim the title has based his system on 
the primary assumption that man, of his 
own motion, cannot remotely touch the 
" thing-in-itself," the noumenon^ the Ab- 
solute, but is able to deal only with the 
phenomenon or, as Aristotle calls it, the 
" phantasm." " In the present state of life, 
in which the soul is united to a passible 
body," says St. Thomas, "it is impossible 
for our intellect to understand anything 
actually, except by turning to the phan- 
tasm " ; and Bergson says the same when he 
states as an axiom that "the mind of man 
by its very nature is incapable of appre- 
hending reality." Philo, the Platonist Jew, 

[69] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

put it succinctly when he wrote, ^^The tram- 
mels of the body prevent men from know- 
ing God in Himself; He is known only in 
the Divine forces in which He manifests 
Himself." 

Yet if we would live we must be able 
'' to put things in their right order," and 
to know God in the sense of personal ap- 
proach if not of comprehension. It is here 
that the love of God shows itself in that He 
does again and again reveal enough of 
the everlasting wisdom and of Himself to 
enable men to assure themselves that He 
is, and, if they will, to turn their footsteps 
in the right way. 

Through the Incarnation came not only 
the Redemption but also the Enlightenment, 
and thereafter the order of the Universe and 
the significance of life were as clear as they 
may ever be without a further explicit 
revelation; but ^^ God has never left Him- 
self without a witness," and so five centuries 
before the Incarnation, and since then 
amongst those who knew not Christ, much 
has been revealed, so that great philoso- 
phers have appeared and have spoken 
"with the tongues of men and angels," and 
the things that we may use for our soul's 

[70] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

health today, when in our own time, with 
all our erudition and our scientific attain- 
ment and our stored-up knowledge of cen- 
turies, the Divine revelation has not come, 
and we have not only forgotten or rejected 
the philosophy of the inspired men of the 
past, but as well have taken to ourselves 
those that spoke without God, makers of 
false philosophies, and so have '^ fallen into 
the falsehoods of our own imaginings." 

In this fact lies not only the reason why 
the world in spite of its material glory 
dipped lower and lower towards the point 
of disaster achieved in July A.D. 1914, but 
the explanation of the notorious inability 
of both organized religion and formal 
philosophy to meet the challenge of a 
world in dissolution during four years of 
war, and finally the lack of a great, con- 
structive, dynamic leading on, at this mo- 
ment when the destinies of man are being 
determined for a period of five centuries. 
There is today no operative philosophy of 
life; we are trifling with the shreds and 
shards of the materialistic and mechanical 
substitutes of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries, from Descartes to Herbert Spen- 
cer, from Hobbes and Kant to Nietzsche 

[71 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

and William James, and in them there is 
neither health nor safety, nor the clear 
conviction, the lucid and logical organism, 
the invigorating and passionate force of 
the Athenians, the Fathers of the Church, 
the Neo-Platonists or the mighty masters 
of Mediaevalism. 

The Reformation destroyed more for us 
of the North and the West than the fabric 
of the Catholic Church and the substance of 
the Catholic Faith. The nexus between 
theology and philosophy is so close that 
what afifects one affects the other. '^ In- 
tellige ut credas; crede ut intelligas^^'^ says 
St. Augustine. It is not so much that the- 
ology begins where philosophy leaves off, 
and vice versa, as it is that both pursue an 
actually parallel course in time, and side 
by side; if one falls the other stumbles, and 
unless quick recovery is effected both are 
involved in a common ruin. I do not know 
which stumbled first at that critical moment 
when Mediaevalism yielded to the Renais- 
sance. Machiavelli wrote ^^11 Principe" 
in 1 5 13, Luther posted his Theses in 15 17, 
and the protagonist of the assault on Catho- 
lic philosophy and ethics would thus ap- 
pear to have an advantage of some four 

[72] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

years over the protagonist of the assault on 
Catholic theology and religion. On the 
other hand, while the new paganism in 
philosophy does not antedate the fall of 
Constantinople in 1453, the particular form 
of heresy that was to rend the unity of the 
Church for the latest time and plunge entire 
nations in centuries of heresy and schism, 
had shown itself sporadically more than a 
hundred years before. The question is of 
no importance; the first breakdown of 
Catholic theology and Catholic philosophy 
practically synchronized during the period 
known as the Reformation, and wherever 
the Faith was abandoned the philosophy 
went with it. 

Our own epoch, modernism (as one 
should say Mediaevalism, or the Dark Ages 
or Roman Imperialism), the five hundred 
years extending from the formal end of the 
Middle Ages in 1453, to 1953 — or whatever 
may be the year when the next epoch is 
determined for good or ill, — is that period 
during which the peoples that rejected both 
Catholic theology and Catholic philosophy, 
or tolerated both with a thin formalism that 
voided them of all power, have directed 
the development of society and determined 

[ 73 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

the lives of its peoples up to and including 
its climacteric in the Great War. Whether 
they were worth having at the price, this 
new religion and this new philosophy — or 
rather these ^ for the diversity is extreme — 
does not concern me at this present. The 
point I wish to make is that as those two 
things, each unique in its sphere, made 
possible the five centuries of Mediaeval 
civilization which formed the most suc- 
cessful exposition of Christianity that has 
thus far been achieved, and that as their 
obliteration is responsible for the civiliza- 
tion (however we may estimate it) that has 
now succeeded in destroying itself after 
a remarkable dominion of other five cen- 
turies, so the future, the foundations of 
which we have now to lay, can only ap- 
proach in dignity, nobility and achievement 
the Christian centuries of the Middle Ages 
if we are willing and able to forsake mod- 
ernist religion and modernist philosophy 
and return explicitly to the religion and 
the philosophy of that incomparable olden 
time. In a word, a sane and wholesome 
and just and righteous future can be built 
only on the corner-stones of Catholic re- 
ligion and sacramental philosophy. 

[74] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

For once it is not necessary to argue over 
the matter of religion; the logic of events 
has dealt with that and fixed its own de- 
terminations. The question of philosophy 
is in a different category. We have so long 
been accustomed to live without a philoso- 
phy and to take refuge in archaeology and 
^^the appeal to history" and the flimsy 
scaffoldings of Teutonism or Evolutionism 
or Pragmatism, we neither feel the need of 
this strong defence, this vast directing 
energy, nor take kindly to it when it is 
offered. Yet there can be no right and 
enduring religion without a right philos- 
ophy, as there can be no right and endur- 
ing philosophy without a right religion. 
'^ Philosophy is the science of the totality 
of things." "They are called wise [that 
is to say, philosophers] who put things in 
their right order and control them well." 
" Philosophy regards the sum-total of re- 
ality." The moment has come for us to see 
things as a whole, to establish a new system 
of comparative values, to confront not 
fictions but realities. "The integrit}^ of 
our nature is repaired by wisdom," wrote 
St. Vincent of Beauvais. Reparation lies 
before us, — of our nature, of society and of 

[75 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

the world, — and to that end we must turn 
to philosophy, that as ever it may fortify 
the impulse of religion and by religion be 
irradiated by the grace of God. 

What then is this philosophy of the Mid- 
dle Ages that is in itself as definitive as the 
Catholic Faith? It is no ethnic or passing 
intellectual by-product; it is the synthesis 
of antecedent philosophies, Neo-Platonic, 
Jewish, Arabian, Byzantine, Patristic, 
Peripatetic, Socratic, purged of their alien 
elements, gathered into an organic unity, 
and vitalized by the Catholic religion. Its 
greatest exponents are St. Thomas Aquinas, 
Duns Scotus and Hugh of St. Victor. It 
was this philosophy that, consciously or 
unconsciously, formed the substance of the 
wisdom of the peoples of the Middle Ages, 
conditioning all their acts and all their 
intellectual processes. As, with the Catho- 
lic religion, it was the energizing force in 
life, making possible the only consistent 
Christian civilization thus far achieved, so 
was it the full rounding out of a great cul- 
ture that re-created all the arts for its own 
expression, invented new ones, and raised 
them all to a level of unexampled achieve- 
ment. Its abandonment synchronized, if 

[76] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

it did not compass, the fall of Christian 
civilization and the entrance of the New 
Paganism which has now, in its turn, met 
its nemesis in its own suicidal aggrandize- 
ment 

In trying to express in brief and sugges- 
tive form this philosophy of sacramentalism, 
I have not confined myself to any one 
system, neither to the Dominican, the 
Franciscan nor the Augustinian synthesis; 
I have tried to establish a working theory 
by a moulding together of all three (since 
for all practical purposes this is what 
historically happened) and I have not dis- 
dained a return, on occasion, to the Neo- 
Platonists, particularly Plotinus, and to the 
Greek and Jewish philosophers themselves, 
from whom all their successors have 
learned much and at whose feet they have 
sat as respectful scholars. Daring much 
in this process, I have doubtless fallen into 
philosophical error, and perhaps have even 
offended against dogmatic truth, but I pro- 
fess here and now that I submit all I say to 
Catholic Authority, and that I desire to 
teach nothing contrary to the Catholic 
Faith. 

The world as we know it, man, life itself 
[77] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

as it works through all creation, is the union 
of matter and spirit; and matter is not 
spirit, nor spirit matter, nor is one a mode 
of the other, but they are two different 
creatures. Apart from this union of matter 
and spirit there is no life in the sense in 
which we know it, and severance is death. 
^^The body," says St. Thomas, ^'is not of 
the essence of the soul ; but the soul by the 
nature of its essence can be united to the 
body, so that, properly speaking, the soul 
alone is not the species, but the composite," 
and Duns Scotus makes clear the nature and 
origin of this common ^^ essence" when he 
says there is ^^on the one hand God as In- 
finite Actuality, on the other spiritual and 
corporal substances possessing a homo- 
geneous common element." That is to say, 
both matter and spirit are the result of the 
Divine creative act and though separate 
and opposed find their common point of 
departure in the Divine Actuality. 

The created world is the concrete mani- 
festation of matter through which, for its 
own transformation and redemption, spirit 
is active in a constant process of interpene- 
tration, whereby matter itself is being 
eternally redeemed. What then is matter, 

[78] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

and what is spirit? In the theory of Ploti- 
nus, '^ the process of emanation from a 
Supreme Principle, the one source of all 
existing things, explains the physical and 
metaphysical worlds. According as the 
principle gives out its energy, it exhausts 
itself, its determinations follow a descend- 
ing scale, becoming less and less perfect. 
Every generative process implies a deca- 
dence or inferiority in the generated prod- 
uct. And in the series of Divine genera- 
tions there must be a final stage, at which 
the primal energy, weakened by successive 
emissions, is no longer capable of produc- 
ing anything real. A limit is necessarily 
reached beneath which there cannot be 
anything less perfect; this limit is matter. 
Matter is merely the space which con- 
ditions all corporate existence; it is a pure 
possibility of being, mere nothingness, and 
is identified with primitive evil." 

In the sense he clearly intends, Plotinus' 
theory of ^^ emanation " is of course super- 
seded by the Christian doctrine of creation, 
but it was an illuminating approximation to 
final truth. Similarly, God cannot exhaust 
Himself, but there is manifestly a great dis- 
crepancy in point of perfection between the 

[79] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

angels at one end of the scale, and simple 
matter, before form is given it, at the other, 
while in between are the many categories 
of creation. Neither is matter ^^mere 
nothingness," for it is a created thing 
therefore it exists, even without form. I do 
not quote Plotinus as authoritative, but 
rather as one who through '^ natural " reve- 
lation has approached closely to the truth 
of Divine revelation. 

Subjected to certain necessary changes in 
terminology I cannot see why this defini- 
tion of matter does not coincide with Duns 
Scotus' Materia primo prima, which is 
thus described by the great Franciscan. 
^'Materia primo prima is the indeterminate 
element of contingent things. This does not 
exist in Nature, but it has reality in so far 
as it constitutes the term of God's creative 
activity. By its union with a substantial 
form it becomes endowed with the attri- 
butes of quantity and becomes secundo 
prima. Subject to the substantial changes 
of Nature it is matter as we perceive it.'' * 

It is this materia primo prima^ ^^ the term 

* Plotinus calls matter "the limit" of Divine generation be- 
cause it marks the exhaustion of creative activity. Scotus calls It 
"the term" because beyond it God did not will to extend this 
creative activity. 

[ 80] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

of God's creative activity," that is eternally 
subjected to the regenerative process of 
spiritual interpenetration, and the result is 
organic life. 

Is this matter ^^ primitive evil" in the 
sense in which Plotinus uses it? No, for 
omne ens est bonum and because ^' God 
made all things good from the beginning." 
On the other hand, matter is in itself dead, 
inert, constantly exerting on spirit a gravi- 
tational pull that must be overcome. In 
a real sense, therefore, its inertness does 
manifest itself as ^^ evil " since its resistance 
to spirit is actual and must be overcome. 

What is "spirit" as the term is used 
here? The creative Power of the Logos, 
in the sense in which St. John interprets 
and corrects the early, partial and errone- 
ous theory of the Stoics and of Philo. God 
the Son, the Eternal Word of the Father, 
^^ the brightness of His glory and the figure 
of His substance." " God of God, Light 
of Light, very God of very God, begotten 
not made, being of one substance with the 
Father, by whom all things were made." 
Pure wisdom, pure intellect, pure will, 
unconditioned by matter, but creating life 
out of the operation of His Spirit on and 

[8i ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

through matter, and in the fullness of time 
becoming Incarnate for the purpose of the 
final redemption of man. 

Now since man is so compact of matter 
and of spirit, it must follow that he cannot 
lay hold of that pure spirit, that Absolute 
that lies beyond and above all material 
conditioning, except through the medium 
of matter, through its figures, its symbol- 
ism, its ^^ phantasms." Says St. Thomas, 
'' From material things we can rise to 
some kind of knowledge of immaterial 
things, but not to the perfect knowledge 
thereof." The way of life, therefore, is 
the increasing endeavour of man to ap- 
proach the Absolute through the leading 
of the Holy Spirit, so running parallel to 
that slow perfecting of matter which is being 
effected by the same operation. So matter 
takes on a certain sanctity, not only as some- 
thing in process of perfection, but as the 
vehicle of spirit and its tabernacle, since in 
matter spirit is for us in a sense incarnate. 

From this process follows of necessity the 
whole sacramental system of the Catholic 
Church, as this is set over against both the 
Protestant theory and that of modernist 
symbolism. To the Protestant as to the 

[ 82 ] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

Jew the material thing is (though only in 
theory) incorrigibly base, to be despised 
and treated with contempt, while the 
spiritual thing, the soul, may and does unite 
itself to, and perfectly achieve union with 
ultimate spirit directly, without the in- 
tervention of the material vehicle, and in 
proportion to its isolation from matter. 
The Protestant rejects even the value of the 
symbol; the modern symbolist, or ritualist 
if you like the word better, sees the symbol 
and values it, but he does not recognize 
the reality behind the symbol, contenting 
himself with what is no more than a form 
of poetry or other art, and he no more 
achieves either a right philosophy, the real 
religion, or that mystical union with God 
that is his aim, than does the Protestant or 
the scientific rationalist. I speak of gen- 
eralities; there are anomalous personalities 
that, for His own ends, God gives that 
Beatific Vision that ^^o'erleaps the bounds" 
of matter, whereby the law of life is for 
them superseded and the material nexus is 
abrogated. These are the prophets, seers, 
mystics, — the greatest artists perhaps as 
well, — but they are not properly of this 
world as we know it; for the vast majority 

[ 83 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

of men the way of matter is the road 
proscribed. 

How fatal is this pseudo-philosophy that 
would cleave life in halves by isolating 
matter on one side and spirit on the other, 
is shown by the experience of those who 
accepted it. Rejecting the Sacraments as 
Divine channnels of grace ordered and 
established for the transfusion through ma- 
terial agencies of the power of God the 
Holy Ghost, and denying even the value 
of their symbolism; denouncing the priest- 
hood as a man-made obstacle between the 
created and the Creator; scorning the body 
and condemning all material things as hate- 
ful and as stumbling-blocks; they never- 
theless became the proponents of aggressive 
materialism; organizers of industrialism, 
creators of ^^big business" and ^'high 
finance," exploiters of labour and of 
markets, prophets of a civilization of greed, 
covetousness and profiteering. It is the 
Protestant nations and their enclaves of 
Jews that built up that materialistic civil- 
ization that in its bloated triumph finds 
its own nemesis in the war of the last five 
years and the events that are to follow in 
the five next years that are to come. The 

[ 84] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

material thing is deadly only when it is cut 
off from the spiritual thing; united, matter 
ennobled as an agent, spirit familiarized 
through its homely housing, we have that 
just balance which has issue in a culture and 
a civilization such as that of the Middle 
Ages. 

Sacramentalism, in theology, in disci- 
pline and in philosophy, is the essential 
system of Christianity, and it follows in- 
evitably from the fundamental doctrines 
of the Incarnation and the Redemption. 
Those portions of the Church of Christ that 
adhere to it in its three manifestations will 
endure, the others will wither away. 
Furthermore, no compromise is possible 
any more than compromise is possible with 
truth. As the time came when America 
could no longer exist half slave and half 
free, so the time has now come (and the 
warning has been explicit) when the 
Church can no longer exist under the same 
conditions. 

As the rejection of the Seven Sacraments 
deprived northern Europe of that stream 
of spiritual energy, forever, and by the 
covenant of God, coursing through the 
several material channels of operation, 

[85] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

leaving man bereft of his surest reinforce- 
ment against the eternal gravitational pull 
of matter; as the abandonment of Catholic 
order and discipline unloosed the floods of 
intellectual insolence and vulgarian pre- 
sumptuousness, cleaving Christianity in 
halves and reducing the moiety thereof into 
a hoveling chaos of ill-conditioned heresies, 
so the forsaking of sacramental philosophy 
left life meaningless except as a sort of neo- 
Manicheism as exploited by Calvin and 
the Puritans, and as an everlasting warfare, 
the prize of v^hich was material gain 
through power or money, as was demon- 
strated (though not always avowed) by the 
creators and beneficiaries of industrial 
civilization. The nineteenth century phi- 
losophy of Evolution with its dogmas of the 
struggle for life, and the survival of the 
fittest, was the effort of sincere men to cast 
a veil of respectability over a thing in itself 
ignominious and unchristian, and the re- 
sults of its acceptance have recently been 
demonstrated to admiration. 

Dualism is the destroyer of righteousness, 
and the Catholic philosophy of sacramen- 
talism is the antithesis of dualism. The 
sanctity of matter as the potential of spirit 

[86] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

and its dwelling-place on earth; the human- 
izing of spirit through its condescension 
to man through the making of his body and 
all created things its earthly tabernacle, 
give, when carried out into logical develop- 
ment, a meaning to life and a glory to the 
world and an elucidation of otherwise un- 
solvable mysteries, and an impulse towards 
noble living, neither Protestantism nor 
even Christian Science can afford. It is 
a real philosophy of life, a standard of 
values, a criterion of all possible postulates, 
and as its loss meant the world's death, so 
its recovery may mean its resurrection. 

In harmony with this consummate phi- 
losophy, and as its inevitable corollary, 
came the whole sacramental system of the 
Church, whereby every material thing was 
recognized as possessing in varying degree 
sacramental potentiality, while seven great 
Sacraments were instituted to be, each after 
its own fashion, a special channel for the 
influx of the power of God the Holy Ghost. 
Each was a symbol, a ^^ phantasm," to use the 
word of Aristotle, just as so many other 
created things were, or could become, 
symbols, but beyond this they were realities, 
veritable media for the veritable communi- 

[ 87 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

cation of veritable Divine grace. Voided of 
power, reduced to the status of mere sym- 
bols, they become nothing; only the senti- 
mental stimuli of personal emotion. There 
is no better definition of a Sacrament than 
that of Hugh of St. Victor: '^The Sacrament 
is the corporeal or material element set out 
sensibly, representing from its similitude, 
signifying from its institution, and contain- 
ing from its sanctification, some invisible 
and spiritual grace." This is the unvarying 
and unvariable doctrine of the Catholic 
Church ; and the reason for its existence as 
a living and functioning organism, and the 
very methods of its operation, follow from 
this supreme institution of the Sacraments. 
The whole sacramental system is in a sense 
an extension of the Redemption, and one 
Sacrament, the Eucharist, also in a sense an 
extension of the Incarnation, just as it is 
also a daily, even hourly, extension in time 
of the Sacrifice of Calvary. The Church 
considered as simply the fellowship of the 
faithful is not an organism, it is an emotion. 
The Catholic Church is more than this; it 
is a living organism, and as such it is subject 
to the definite, explicit and unchanging 
laws of its organic system. What happens to 

[ 88 ] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

the individual when he ceases to be a justly 
co-ordinated organism is demonstrated in 
countless insane asylums. What happens 
to a State under similar conditions is ac- 
complished by Russia and is in process of 
evolution in Germany, if not throughout 
modern society. Indeed Protestantism it- 
self is sufficient evidence of the disastrous 
results that follow from such an abnormal 
course. 

The Incarnation and the Redemption 
are not accomplished facts, completed nine- 
teen centuries ago, they are processes that 
still continue, and their term is fixed only 
by the total regeneration and perfecting of 
matter, and the Seven Sacraments are the 
chiefest among an infinity of sacramental 
processses which are the agencies of this 
eternal transfiguration. 

Christ not only became Incarnate to ac- 
complish the Redemption of men as yet 
unborn, for endless ages, through the com- 
pleted Sacrifice of Calvary, but also to 
initiate a new method whereby the results 
were to be more perfectly attained ; that is 
to say, the Church, working through the 
specific sacramental agencies He had or- 
dained or was later to ordain through His 

[ 89] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

direction of the Church He had brought 
into being at Pentecost. He did not come 
to ordain a revolutionary code of ethics or 
even to offer in His own Person a new 
Model for human following. He was 
neither a newer Socrates nor an older 
Buddha, but God Himself, revealing the 
whole system of life and the reason for the 
world, and, through the New Covenant of 
the Catholic Sacraments and the One, In- 
divisible Catholic Church preserved from 
error in its official determinations in faith 
and morals, by virtue of His Presence 
therein until the consummation of the 
world, to fix this method of salvation in 
terms and under conditions identical with 
the process of life itself, and in forms fitted 
to the comprehension of, and freely avail- 
able for, every man that is born of woman. 

He did not come to establish in material 
form a Kingdom of Heaven on earth or to 
provide for its ultimate coming. He in- 
deed established a Spiritual Kingdom, His 
Church, ^' in the world, not of it," but this 
is a very different matter — as the centuries 
have proved. His Kingdom is not of this 
world, nor will it be established here. The 
folly and the conceit of nineteenth century 

[90] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

evolutionists have received their quietus 
during the last few years. There has been 
no absolute advance in human development 
since the Incarnation, nor yet during the 
space of recorded history. Nations rise and 
fall, epochs wax and wane, civilizations 
grow out of savagery, crest, and sink back 
into savagery again. Redemption is for the 
individual, not for the race nor yet for 
society as a whole, nor even for matter itself 
except as this becomes definite and concrete 
in the individual ; and there, and only there, 
and under that form, it is sure, however 
long may be the period of its accomplish- 
ment. ^^ Time is the ratio of the resistance 
of matter to the interpenetration of Spirit" 
and by this resistance is the duration of 
time determined. When it shall have been 
wholly overcome then ^^time shall be no 
more." God the Holy Ghost, proceed- 
ing from the Father and the Son, and by 
the channel of each individual soul, oper- 
ates directly on the matter which in human 
form is the object of redemption, and the 
Sacraments are not only the Divinely or- 
dained agencies of this operation but the 
perfect symbols of life itself. 

See therefore how perfect is the corre- 
[91 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

spondence between the Sacraments and the 
method of life where they are the agents 
and which they symbolically set forth. 
There is in each case the material form and 
the spiritual substance or energy. As Hugh 
of St. Victor says, each represents from its 
similitude, signifies from its institution, and 
contains from its sanctification some invis- 
ible and spiritual grace. Water, chrism, 
oil, the spoken word, the touch of the hands, 
the sign of the cross, and finally and su- 
premely the bread and wine of Holy Mass, 
each a material thing but each representing, 
signifying and containing some gift of the 
Holy Spirit, real, absolute and potent. So 
matter and spirit are linked together in 
every operation of Holy Church from the 
cradle to the grave, and man has ever before 
him the eternal revelation of this linked 
union of matter and spirit in his life, the 
eternal teaching of the honour of the ma- 
terial thing through its agency and through 
its existence as the subject for redemption, 
while through the material association and 
the Divine condescension to his earthly and 
fallible estate (limited by the association 
with matter to only inadequate presenta- 
tion) he makes the spirit of God his own, 

[ 92 ] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

to dwell therewith after the fashion of 
man. 

As I have said elsewhere, "Man ap- 
proaches, and must always approach, spirit- 
ual things not only through material forms 
but by means of material agencies. The 
highest and most beautiful things, those 
where the spirit seems to achieve its loftiest 
reaches, are frequently associated with the 
grossest and most unspiritual material 
forms, yet the very splendour of the spirit- 
ual verity redeems and glorifies the mate- 
rial agency, while on the other hand the 
homeliness and even animal quality of the 
material thing brings to man, with a poign- 
ancy and an appeal that are incalculable, 
the spiritual thing that in its absolute es- 
sence would be so far beyond his ken and 
his experience and his powers of assimila- 
tion that it would be inoperative." 

This is the true Humanism, not the 
fictitious and hollow thing that was the off- 
spring of Neo-Paganism and took to itself 
a title to which it had no claim. Held con- 
sciously or tacitly by the men of the Middle 
Ages from the immortal philosopher to 
the immortal but nameless craftsman, it 
was the force that built up the noble social 

[93] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

structure of the time and poised man him- 
self in a sure equilibrium. Already it had 
of necessity developed the whole scheme 
of religious ceremonial and given art a new 
content and direction through its new 
service. By analogy and association all 
material things that could be so used were 
employed as figures and symbols, as well 
as agencies, through the Sacraments, and 
after a fashion that struck home to the 
soul through the organs of sense. Music, 
vestments, poetry and dramatic action, in- 
cense, candles, flowers, all were linked with 
the great arts of architecture, painting and 
sculpture, and all became not only ministers 
to the emotional faculties but direct appeals 
to the intellect through their function as 
poignant symbols. So art received its soul, 
and was almost a living thing until matter 
and spirit were again divorced in the death 
that severed them during the Reformation, 
and thereafter religion entered upon a 
period of slow desiccation and sterilization 
wherever the symbol was cast away with 
the Sacraments and the sacramental phi- 
losophy that had made it live. Indifference 
or hostility to the pregnant and evocative 
and supremely beautiful ceremonial of the 

[94] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

Catholic Faith is less ignorance of the 
meaning and function of art and an inherited 
hatred of its quality and its power, than 
they are the natural reactions of the con- 
scious and determined rejection of the 
essential philosophy of the Catholic Church, 
which is sacramentalism. 

With the first perfecting of this philos- 
ophy during the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
turies along the three parallel lines of 
Hugh of St. Victor, Duns Scotus and St. 
Thomas Aquinas, came concurrently the 
brief but glorious flowering of Christian 
civilization from 1050 to 1300. It was 
then that not only philosophy, but theology, 
education, literature and all the old regen- 
erated arts, and many new arts as well, 
achieved a sort of grand climacteric. It 
was during the same period that human 
society, political, industrial and economic, 
accomplished its highest perfection under 
Christianity, and the force widespread 
throughout the social organism concen- 
trated itself in such focal points of dazzling 
light as St. Louis, St. Thomas and Dante, 
the Arthurian legend, the perfected Grego- 
rian music and Reims Cathedral. 

The whole sacramental system of philos- 
[95 1 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

ophy was of an almost sublime perfection 
and simplicity, and the Catholic Sacraments 
were both its goal and its types. If they had 
been of the same value and identical in na- 
ture they would have failed of perfect expo- 
sition, in the sense in which they were types 
or symbols. They were not this, for while 
six of the explicit seven were sufficiently 
of one mode, there was one where the con- 
ditions that held elsewhere were tran- 
scended and where, in addition to the two 
functions it was instituted to perform, it 
gave through its similitude the clear revela- 
tion of the most significant and pregnant 
fact in the vast mystery of life. I mean 
of course the Holy Eucharist. 

I desire to approach this consideration 
with the most complete abasement and pro- 
found reverence. I am not unmindful of 
the wise saying of St. Thomas a Kempis 
^^'Twere well not to inquire too curiously 
into the nature of this Sacrament," but it 
is impossible to complete the consideration 
of what is the essential philosophy of Chris- 
tianity unless this point is made clear. The 
designation, the nomenclature, dates back 
perhaps no farther than Hildebert of Tours 
in the eleventh century; the fact is attested 

[96] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

as a theological and philosophical proposi- 
tion by Paschasus Radbertus two cen- 
turies earlier, that is to say, in the time 
of Charlemagne. I refer to the dogma of 
Transubstantiation as expressing the man- 
ner whereby the Real Presence of God 
Incarnate is accomplished in the Holy 
Eucharist. 

Now, in the first place, I wish to protest 
against two statements that are frequently 
made by those who are inimically disposed 
towards this doctrine. First, that it is only 
a quibbling over definitions that do not 
effect the fact; second, that defence of Tran- 
substantiation is an affected and antiqua- 
rian attempt to restore a detail of an 
outworn scholasticism. I maintain that 
neither is true, but that, on the contrary, 
Transubstantiation meets a philosophical 
necessity inherent in the system of sacra- 
mentalism which is afforded by no other 
assumption whatever. There are four 
possible theories : 1st, the Zwinglian, which 
as has been said, actually amounts to the 
"real absence" and may be disregarded, 
since it is contradicted by Christ Himself, 
has no place in historic Christianity back 
to the Apostolic Fathers, and is rejected by 

[97] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

Ecclesia Anglicana and even by the Lu- 
theran and Westminster Confessions; 2nd, 
the Lutheran, that is to say, consubstantia- 
tion; Jrd, the theory of Osiander, some- 
times called ^' impanation," where Christ is 
really present through an hypostatic union; 
these last two covering, I suppose, the be- 
liefs of the great majority of Anglicans; 
and there is finally the Catholic doctrine 
of Transubstantiation. 

I am speaking now wholly from a phil- 
osophical standpoint. It is perhaps true that 
the doctrines of Osiander and Luther, as 
these are interpreted by Anglicans, are 
sufficient from a theological and a devo- 
tional standpoint. If life is what it is held 
to be by the philosophy of the Catholic 
Church, then the Catholic theory (or 
dogma, as it has been since the Council of 
Trent) is the only one which completes, by 
its symbolism and its assertion of fact, the 
sacramental showing forth, through great 
symbols, of the nature of life. 

Under all other interpretation of this 
great Mystery, which is the crown of all 
the Sacraments, it does not differ from 
them except in degree; as in the case of 
the water of Baptism, the material agent 

[98] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

remains unchanged, — it is matter still, pre- 
cisely as before the words and acts of Con- 
secration. The wafer is still unleavened 
bread, the wine and water have not changed 
in character; they have simply become the 
vehicle whereby God gives Himself to 
man. At the most the substance, bread, and 
the Substance, the Body of Christ, exist to- 
gether after a mystical manner, i. e. through 
consubstantiation. 

This doctrine of the Real Presence leaves 
the elements essentially unchanged, not only 
in their substance but in their accidents; but 
by spiritual interpenetration they become 
for the communicant, the offerer of the Holy 
Sacrifice, and those for whom it is offered, 
the Body and Blood of Christ. On the other 
hand the Catholic doctrine is that by the act 
of Consecration the very substance of the 
bread and wine are transformed into an 
altogether different Substance, the very 
Body and Blood of Christ, only the acci- 
dents of form, colour, ponderability, etc., 
remaining. 

It would be presumptuous for me to 
compare or contrast these two views of 
the Blessed Sacrament from a religious 
standpoint. Speaking philosophically, the 

• [ 99 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

doctrine of Transubstantiation certainly re- 
veals and substantiates a great principle 
that may be the very secret of life itself and 
the reason for the existence of the world, 
while its abandonment by Protestants, not 
to mention infidels and agnostics, lies close 
at the root of that materialism that has 
reached its logical climax in the present 
world-wide catastrophe. 

If matter is forever matter, inert, un- 
changeable, indestructible, then it is hard 
to escape the sense of dualism in the uni- 
verse: matter and spirit uniting in man as 
body and soul, in the sacraments as the 
vehicle and the essence, but temporally 
and temporarily; doomed always to ulti- 
mate severance either by death or by the 
completion of each sacramental process. 
Suppose, on the other hand, the object of 
the universe and of time is the constant re- 
demption and transformation of matter, 
through its interpenetration by spirit 
through the power of God the Holy Ghost. 
Suppose that the miracle of Transubstantia- 
tion is but the type and showing forth of 
the incessant process of life whereby, every 
instant, matter itself is being changed and 
glorified, and transferred from the plane 

[ lOO ] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

of matter — the earth-plane — to the plane 
of spirit — the heavenly plane. Is not this 
the meaning of St. Paul's ^' There is an 
earthly body and there is a spiritual body; 
we are sown in corruption, we are raised 
in incorruptibility." 

If this is so, if the Incarnation and 
Redemption are types and symbols of the 
Divine process forever proceeding here on 
earth, then while the other Sacraments are 
in themselves not only agencies of grace, 
but manifestations of that process whereby 
in all things matter is used as the vehicle 
of the spirit, the Mass, transcending them 
all, is not only Communion, not only a 
Sacrifice for the quick and the dead accept- 
able before God, but it is also the unique 
symbol of the redemption and transforma- 
tion of matter, since, of all the Sacraments, 
it is the only one where the very physical 
qualities of the material vehicle are trans- 
formed, and while the accidents alone re- 
main, the substance, finite and perishable, 
becomes in an instant of time, and by the 
Divine miracle of Transubstantiation, in- 
finite and immortal. 

I confess that to me the Catholic argu- 
ment is unanswerable and that only through 
: [ loi ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

this doctrine is the philosophy of Christi- 
anity rounded out to its fullness. '^This 
is a hard saying: who shall hear it?" and 
many go back and walk no more with Christ 
even as in the days when the words were 
spoken: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man 
and drink His blood, ye have no life in 
you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh 
my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise 
him up at the last day. For my flesh is 
meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed. 
He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my 
blood, dwelleth in me and I in him. As 
the living Father hath sent me, and I live 
by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he 
shall live by me. Thisf is that bread which 
came down from heaven : not as your fathers 
did eat manna, and are dead : he that eateth 
of this bread shall live forever.'' 

We do well to look and work for a new 
brotherhood of man on earth as the crown- 
ing gift of the War: we do better when we 
pray and labour for the reunion of all 
Christendom in the One, Holy, Catholic and 
Apostolic Church, but neither the one nor 
the other is to be achieved unless to right 
religion we add a right philosophy. In- 

[ 102 ] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

ternational covenants are ropes of sand, 
without international love, justice and fidel- 
ity, and there is no engine or device of 
Christian union that will be operative 
unless it is energized and consecrated by 
charity — caritas — and a consistent, crea- 
tive, sovereign philosophy of life. If we 
would have one or both, the Church and the 
Brotherhood — and both we must have if 
we are to escape the peril of a new Dark 
Ages — let us look to it that our religion 
is redeemed, our philosophy recreated, for 
otherwise neither individually nor collec- 
tively can we meet and turn back the new 
hordes of Huns and Vandals now gathering 
for another onslaught on an imperial but 
futile civilization — no more supreme and 
irresistible than that other their own kind 
brought to an end in fire and sack and 
slaughter just fifteen centuries ago. 

I desire to make my plea for the restora- 
tion of the one Christian philosophy, in 
all its integrity and with nothing cut out or 
cast aside, solely on the ground of its ever- 
lasting truth; but even in the acceptance 
of truth and the establishing of justice there 
is expediency. As the first step towards a 
new world-order is a right philosophy — 
[ 103 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

the power '^ to put things in their right 
places and control them well," — so it has its 
bearings on matters that touch us at present 
very closely, and that must be adjusted 
without delay if we are to play our part in 
the new though almost desperate Crusade 
for the redemption of the Holy Places of 
the human soul. For the lack of a right 
philosophy (or of any philosophy whatever, 
for that matter) the Councillors of the 
Nations now assembled flounder and fall 
down, while the nemesis of world-anarchy 
swiftly overtakes their chaotic delibera- 
tions. For the lack of a right philosophy 
we of Ecclesia Anglicana parallel their 
courses, and have done so time out of 
mind. The time has come when neither 
charity nor expediency can permit the 
Church to continue along the lines of uni- 
versal comprehension. The Great Testing 
is at hand, and before that menace of in- 
comparable potency the House of Salvation 
cannot rest divided against itself. As it 
is religion alone, the religion of Christ 
crucified, that can save man at this juncture, 
so is it the Catholic Church, through its 
Sacraments and by the strength of its sup- 
porting philosophy, that alone can act as 
[ 104 ] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

the engine of redemptive operation. In 
the red light of menacing dissolution every 
predilection, every prejudice, every per- 
sonal conviction; all except the solemn and 
unmistakable mandate of conscience alone, 
must be sacrificed and cast aside. The 
unity of the Church in the Catholic Faith 
and under Catholic Authority is the instant 
and desperate necesssity. 

To this end the first step is the explicit 
acceptance of the Catholic doctrine of the 
Sacraments, and the Catholic philosophy 
of sacramentalism, with Holy Mass as the 
true Communion of the true Body and 
Blood of Christ, as an ever nev^ Sacrifice 
acceptable before God for the sins of the 
whole world, and as, in the words of St. 
Thomas, ^^the end and aim of all the 
Sacraments," with Transubstantiation as 
the sufficient expression of the manner of 
Christ's Presence therein. 

I think it is the lack of this clear con- 
sciousness, theologically and philosophi- 
cally, that is answerable for the vacillating 
and compromising courses we are disposed 
to follow, now at this critical moment when 
we realize that unity in the Church is 
closely bound up with the great problem 
[ 105 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

whether civilization, even society itself, is 
to continue except after a second five cen- 
turies of Dark Ages. Rightly and hon- 
ourably we look on the one hand towards 
the Protestant denominations, on the other 
towards all those in Communion with the 
Apostolic See, tentatively approaching 
them with well-meant advances, in the des- 
perate hope that so we may have some part 
in the restoration of Catholic unity. I can- 
not avoid the conviction that the lack of a 
definite philosophy has much to do with 
the variousness of these approaches and the 
very great unwisdom of some amongst them. 
A case in point is the question of the ac- 
ceptance of Episcopal order on the part of 
those bodies that have rejected it and still 
protest they desire it not at all. It ap- 
pears that both in England and America 
propositions have from time to time been 
made that practically amount to this: that 
if the Protestant bodies will only accept 
the Episcopate as a fact, no questions will 
be asked as to any theories they may hold 
as to its nature and function. Now under 
correction I maintain that this is a case of 
failing ^^to put things in their right order 
and control them well." If the Episcopate 
[ io6] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

represented simply a form of order and 
government, even with Divine sanction 
and institution, this might be possible, but 
in that case I submit we should have no 
moral right to impose it as an absolute con- 
dition, when the question of unity is in- 
volved. The doctrine of the Catholic 
Church is not this, however. The Episco- 
pate has two functions, one of which is the 
supreme governance of the faithful; but 
the other and primary function is the trans- 
mission to certain men of the Power of the 
Holy Ghost for the work of a priest in the 
Church of God, that is to say, first of all for 
administering the Sacraments of Baptism, 
Penance, Matrimony and Unction, and, 
above all, the Communion of the Body and 
Blood of Christ and the offering of the 
Holy Sacrifice. In other words, it is not 
the fact of Episcopacy that matters, it is 
the function, and the chief function of the 
Bishop is the making of priests who can 
consecrate the Eucharist, forgive sins, and 
offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar. 

If then we had a clear and unanimous 

theological conviction fortified by an 

equally clear philosophy, we should say to 

the ministers of those whom we euphe- 

[ 107 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

mistically call ^^our separated brethren," 
not '' accept our Bishops and let them have 
the privilege of ordaining you after their 
own fashion and we will ask no embar- 
rasssing questions as to what you think of 
it all, or even if you believe you have so 
gained nothing you did not have before" 
but rather '' You are now a duly accredited 
'minister of the Gospel'; do you want 
to be made a priest? If you do, if you want 
to act as the agent of God, through the 
Power of the Holy Ghost to perform the 
Divine miracle of changing bread and wine 
into the very Body and Blood of Christ; 
if you want to gain power for the remitting 
of sins, and if you want to offer the Holy 
Sacrifice of the Altar for the quick and the 
dead and for the sins of the whole world — 
then you will accept the fact and the au- 
thority of the Episcopate, and the laying 
on of hands whereby alone a priest is made 
by the covenant of God." 

So also would it be in the case of laymen, 
who no longer would '^ come into the 
Church " because they had ritualistic lean- 
ings, or preferred a different social atmos- 
phere, or for any other of the many causes 
now operative; they would come because 
[ io8 ] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

they wanted to confess their sins and receive 
absolution, because they wanted to feed on 
Christ Himself through Holy Communion, 
because they desired to join with the priest 
in offering the Sacrifice of the Mass for 
themselves, for their dead, and for the 
world. 

From the lack of a right philosophy our 
theology is led along divergent lines of 
strange variation, our order and discipline 
are weakened to the point of nullity, and 
even our religion fails of its fullest pos- 
sibilities, and I know of no way in which 
Ecclesia Anglicana can rise to its vast op- 
portunity at a moment when its peculiar 
qualities are most needed for the energiz- 
ing of a true Vita Nuova^ than by the re- 
turn to that sacramental philosophy of the 
Middle Ages which is the only sufficient 
system and the only intellectually adequate 
system thus far revealed to man. 

From such acceptance, or from the con- 
scious desire for it and progress towards 
it, will follow of necessity certain acts and 
ordinances, for every spiritual thing has 
its material expression. The Mass as the 
one obligatory service of worship, and ac- 
cepted both as Communion and Sacrifice; 
[ 109 ] 



GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 

formal recognition of marriage as a Sac- 
rament and therefore indissoluble; the res- 
toration of sacramental confession as the 
normal method of spiritual reconciliation; 
above all, the establishing of Reservation 
of the Blessed Sacrament, not only for sick- 
calls but specifically for private and public 
adoration, as the recognized custom in every 
cathedral and parish church. I should 
perhaps urge the last as the most immedi- 
ately necessary of all. Where the Sacra- 
ment is reserved there is no doubt as to the 
Catholic faithfulness of priest and people, 
and as matters rest with us today, it is neces- 
sary that the Anglican Church should stand 
forth from the cowardice and time-serving 
of an older age to bear witness to the truth 
of the Incarnation and the Redemption as 
these are shown forth in the Sacrament of 
the Body and Blood of Christ. Not only 
does the Presence of Christ in the taber- 
nacle transform a church from an echoing 
conventicle into the very courts of God; 
not only does it teach mutely but potently 
as no human voice can do; not only does it 
lead irresistibly on to the exaltation of the 
Mass as the one supreme Sacrament and 
to the other six as of equal authority and 
[ no] 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY 

obligation; it is also, and for my present 
purpose most essentially, the explicit, visi- 
ble teaching of that philosophy which alone 
can lead men '^ to put things in their right 
order and control them well," so perhaps 
averting from us the nemesis of our own 
follies and falsities, now increasingly in- 
dicated in the Apocalyptic happenings of 
the world. 

I ask then a return, explicit and un- 
compromising, to that philosophy of life 
which was the crowning intellectual glory 
of the great era of the Middle Ages when 
Christianity was fully operative; to that 
philosophy which supplemented, in unity 
and perfection, that Catholic religion that 
had issue in a righteous and beneficent 
social system, in a political estate marked 
by justice and liberty, and in a great and 
incomparable plexus of all the arts that 
jfiowered at last in that Cathedral of Our 
Lady of Reims which its antithesis, in- 
carnate in modernism, could only desecrate 
and destroy. 



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